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Codex Issues / #34083

🔥🔥🔥 Codex intermittently loses external drive write permission while running 🔥🔥🔥

Open 💬 0 comments Opened Jul 18, 2026 by Accademia

What version of the Codex App are you using (From “About Codex” dialog)?

26.715.31925

What subscription do you have?

200USD Pro

What platform is your computer?

MacOS 26.5.2 ARM

What issue are you seeing?

macOS: Codex intermittently loses external drive write permission while running

On macOS, Codex can lose write permission to external drives under /Volumes/... while the app is already running.

The issue is intermittent:

  • Codex can write to the external drive shortly after launch.
  • After running for some time, active Codex tasks may suddenly fail to write to the same external drive.
  • Restarting Codex can temporarily restore access.
  • The failure happens even though Codex.app is already enabled in Full Disk Access.

The external volume itself is healthy:

  • mounted normally
  • not read-only
  • enough free space
  • normal Unix permissions
  • internal disk writes still work

When the bug happens, Codex task processes fail with:

Operation not permitted

Example:

touch: /Volumes/ExternalDrive/.probe: Operation not permitted

At the same time, writes to the internal disk still work, so this does not look like a general filesystem or shell problem.

The actual task process appears to be launched through helper binaries under:

/Applications/Codex.app/Contents/Resources/

In my case, the workaround was to manually add the following helper binaries to macOS Full Disk Access:

/Applications/Codex.app/Contents/Resources/codex
/Applications/Codex.app/Contents/Resources/codex_chronicle
/Applications/Codex.app/Contents/Resources/codex-code-mode-host

Path:

System Settings -> Privacy & Security -> Full Disk Access

After adding these helpers, the same Codex environment could write/read/delete files on the external drive again.

This looks like Codex helper processes may not reliably inherit Full Disk Access / Removable Volumes permission from Codex.app during long-running sessions.

Please investigate why Codex can lose external drive write permission while running, and whether these helper binaries need explicit permission handling or documentation.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

NA

What is the expected behavior?

_No response_

Additional information

_No response_

View original on GitHub ↗