Model assumes Windows PowerShell is running on WSL resulting in seeing an "empty directory"

Resolved 💬 4 comments Opened Apr 19, 2025 by PramaYudhistira Closed Aug 7, 2025

💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (PramaYudhistira, contributor) responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.

What version of Codex is running?

0.1.2504181820

Which model were you using?

04-mini

What platform is your computer?

Microsoft Windows NT 10.0.26100.0 x64

What steps can reproduce the bug?

There isn't a deterministic way to reproduce this but occasionally, the model doesn't know it is running in a Windows PowerShell CLI and so it cannot detect anything in a non-empty working directory. i.e. it sometimes works and sometimes doesn't.

run codex on any non-empty directory, and sometimes the model cannot detect any files as it is running Linux commands on Windows PowerShell

What is the expected behavior?

For the model to detect files.

What do you see instead?

Model occasionally does not detect any files

!Image

But sometimes it does detect files

!Image

As mentioned above, model assumes that it is running on a Linux based environment even though its on Windows PowerShell

!Image

but occasionally detects that it is running on Windows PowerShell

!Image

Additional information

I currently have a solution in mind and I will be working on a possible fix for this either today or tomorrow.

View original on GitHub ↗

4 Comments

PramaYudhistira contributor · 1 year ago

Update: I have finals so regarding the additional information I will be working on this some time in the next week

But this is another example of it not working on powershell due to thinking its on a Linux system

!Image

MovGP0 · 1 year ago

I have the same issue:

user
what is your current directory?

    command

    $ pwd

    command.stdout (code: 0, duration: 2.7s)


    codex
    It looks like the working directory path is coming back empty, which suggests we might not have a conventional shell environment here. Typically, in this interface, I’m already at the
    root of the project repository.

    Could you try running the following directly to confirm?

        pwd

    Or, if you have visibility into the host, please let me know where the repo is checked out.
╭──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│                                                                                                                                                                                          │
╰──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯
  send q or ctrl+c to exit | send "/clear" to reset | send "/help" for commands | press enter to send | shift+enter for new line — 100% context left

Environment

Windows 11 24H2 (build 10.0.26100)
PowerShell 7.5.0 / Warp v0.2025.04.16.08.11.stable_02
tested on x64 (Core i7-8700) and ARM (Snapdragon X) machines

PramaYudhistira contributor · 1 year ago

I added a potential fix in https://github.com/openai/codex/pull/688

codex-maintainers · 1 year ago

Thank you for the feedback! Please try again on the latest version of Codex CLI. If the issue persists, we'd appreciate a contribution to the codex-rs/ implementation. You can find more details on our project update here.