anthropics / anthropics/claude-code
[BUG] Terminal panel: Couldn't send the command's output to Claude - shell silently reconnects mid-command
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Description
Description
The built-in Terminal panel in Claude Desktop intermittently fails to relay command output to the chat session, showing the toast: "Couldn't send the command's output to Claude. Check the terminal tab." Inside the terminal panel itself, this coincides with the line [shell reconnected — replaying buffered output], indicating the terminal's connection to the session dropped and re-established mid-command.
Steps to reproduce
- Open the Terminal panel in Claude Desktop (macOS)
- Run a multi-second command, e.g.:
for i in {1..10}; do echo "line $i"; sleep 1; done - Observe the toast error appearing, sometimes with garbled/interleaved input text in the terminal (characters from the typed command appear reordered)
- The command itself completes successfully (checked via the
read_terminalMCP tool, which independently confirms full correct output) — only the live relay to chat fails
What I've ruled out
- Not caused by a slow shell:
zsh -i -c exitstartup measured at ~15ms - Not caused by
.zshrc/.zprofilecontent: no precmd/preexec hooks, no gh CLI shell integration, no syntax errors (zsh -nclean) - Not caused by GitHub CLI (
gh) installation: no shell rc hooks added by gh - Not caused by a connected GitHub connector: issue persists after fully disconnecting it and restarting the app
- Not caused by hitting usage limits: at time of reproduction, 5-hour usage was 35%, weekly was 76% — nowhere near the cap
- Full app restart (Cmd+Q, relaunch) does not resolve it
- Recurs across multiple separate terminal tabs/sessions, not tied to one tab
Environment
- Claude Desktop, macOS (Darwin 27.0.0, Apple Silicon)
- Default shell: zsh
- Plan: Pro
Impact
Recurs on effectively every terminal command run from the app's Terminal panel, making it unreliable as a live-feedback channel — have to fall back to manually asking Claude to re-read terminal output via the read_terminal tool as a workaround.
Contributor guide
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First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Reproduce the failure in the Claude Desktop Terminal panel with the provided multi-second zsh loop, then compare the live chat relay with the read_terminal MCP tool's output. Done means the command output reaches chat without a shell reconnect, garbled input, or the "Couldn't send the command's output to Claude" toast.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- macos, zsh
- Domain
- cli, desktop
- Issue type
- Bug
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Estimated time
- 3-5 days
- Activity status
- Active
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 45/100