Weird shell escape / quoting issues when running commands
Resolved 💬 3 comments Opened Nov 20, 2025 by ci Closed Nov 20, 2025
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (dylan-hurd-oai, contributor)
responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.
What version of Codex is running?
codex-cli 0.60.1
What subscription do you have?
Pro
Which model were you using?
gpt-5.1-codex-max xhigh
What platform is your computer?
Darwin 24.3.0 arm64 arm
What issue are you seeing?
Running shell commands adds extra quoting around && or | and the LLM gets super confused, fails to do anything. OSX & fish shell
› run ls && rg test | head -1
• Ran ls '&&' rg test '|' head -1
└ ls: &&: No such file or directory
ls: -1: No such file or directory
… +2 lines
ls: test: No such file or directory
ls: |: No such file or directory
• Explored
└ List ls
Search test
─ Worked for 28s ──────────────..
• Ran ls && rg test | head -1 (via bash for shell operators). Output:
- test123
- rg found no matches for "test", so nothing from the pipe.
What steps can reproduce the bug?
Uploaded thread: 019aa18e-97a3-7330-b9e1-7576e2c3ddd8
In my case just running run ls && rg test | head -1 makes it happen. Happens with any model.
What is the expected behavior?
_No response_
Additional information
_No response_
3 Comments
Had the same issues, oddly enough solved it with:
in config.toml.
I am on osx using fish shell if it helps.
that does help, thanks @asafyish!
Helpful bug reports! We welcome feedback on unified_exec, but the default setup should be fixed for fish users in 0.61.0. Closing as a duplicate of #6940