Codex CLI can't access any file
Resolved 💬 6 comments Opened Sep 11, 2025 by MartinKnopf Closed Sep 15, 2025
What version of Codex is running?
codex-cli 0.34.0
Which model were you using?
gpt-5
What platform is your computer?
Darwin 24.6.0 x86_64 i386
What steps can reproduce the bug?
- Install codex cli:
npm i -g @openai/codex - Login with ChatGPT subscription
- Create dummy
README.md:echo "# Test" > README.md - List directory contents:
<img width="420" height="100" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/d51dbf45-698c-4976-b912-10a0a7aa109b" />
- Let codex summarize the file:
codex --yolo "summarize README.md"
What is the expected behavior?
A summary of the file.
What do you see instead?
<img width="674" height="350" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/455b1ad8-d40c-4b1b-b2d4-2dfd0f0821c0" />
Additional information
I already deleted ~/.codex and reinstalled codex. Codex is able to create files and in the same session can read those files. But in a new session it can't read those files again.
6 Comments
also its can't suggest files using @
Thanks for mentioning. Fuzzy search using @ works in interactive mode. But it can't read the files that I point it to.
same issue here, seems sandbox limitation.
For anyone running into this problem, here is my case
The Codex cli always runs commands by calling:
bash -lc "your command"
(for example, bash -lc "ls -la" or bash -lc "pwd").
If you’re using fish (or any shell other than bash) as your main shell, this can break if your ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc forces bash to immediately exec into another shell. In my case, my ~/.bash_profile looked like this:
Because of the exec /bin/zsh -l, bash never actually ran the command — it just switched over to zsh and stopped, causing empty output for codex cli
Fix:
Check your ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc for any lines like exec /bin/zsh -l (or exec fish -l) and remove them. After I removed that line, Codex worked perfectly again, even though my main shell is still fish.
Thank you @minhluuquang! Your fix worked for me.
I ran into a similar issue and was able to resolve it by integrating the filesystem MCP tool. Here’s the exact configuration that worked for me:
~/.codex/config.toml
With this setup, the Codex CLI can properly access and read files from the specified directory, effectively resolving the file access problem.
Feel free to replace "your/project/path" with the actual path to your project. Hope this helps!