Resuming a session can leave truncated and concatenated events in events.jsonl
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Description
### Describe the bug
A resumed session contained malformed JSONL records that prevented it from being resumed again.
Three physical lines each contained an incomplete event prefix immediately followed by a complete JSON event without a newline or separator:
```text
{"type":"assistant.message", ... {"type":"assistant.message", ...}
```
Parsing failed with:
> Expecting ',' delimiter
### Affected configuration
- GitHub Copilot CLI 1.0.71-0
- Linux
- Model: GPT-5.6 Sol (`gpt-5.6-sol`)
- Context window: 1.1M
- Reasoning effort: high
- Session resumed with `copilot --resume=`
The model configuration may not be directly relevant to JSONL persistence, but it is included to make the report reproducible.
### Observed behavior
The affected `events.jsonl` contained three malformed physical lines:
- One truncated `tool.execution_complete` prefix followed by a complete event.
- Two truncated `assistant.message` prefixes followed by complete events.
- The complete suffixes retained the same tool-call or message identifiers as their truncated prefixes.
The complete JSON object began before the preceding incomplete object had been closed or terminated with a newline. The session could not be resumed because the event log was not valid JSONL.
### Expected behavior
Session event writes should be atomic and serialized.
When resuming, the CLI should detect and recover from an incomplete trailing record rather than appending another event directly after it. Concurrent processes should also be prevented from writing to the same session without locking.
### Workaround
After backing up the session, I discarded each unrecoverable prefix and retained its complete JSON-event suffix. Once every physical line contained exactly one valid JSON object, the session resumed normally.
### Possible cause and related issue
Potential causes include:
- Resuming a session while another process still has it open.
- A process being interrupted during an event write.
- Missing locking or recovery around large or chunked JSONL writes.
The same session contained a 72 MB persisted `apply_patch` event reported in #4097. That unusually large write may have widened the failure window, but there is not enough evidence to claim both issues share the same root cause.
I have not attached `events.jsonl` because it contains conversation and tool history.
---
Investigated and filed with assistance from GitHub Copilot CLI.
Contributor guide
Research direction
Start at the `copilot --resume=` flow and trace how `events.jsonl` is written and parsed during session resumption. Reproduce an interrupted or concurrent write if possible, then verify that resumed sessions do not create concatenated JSONL records and that incomplete trailing data is handled safely.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- shell
- Domain
- cli
- Issue type
- Bug
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Estimated time
- 3-5 days
- Activity status
- Quiet
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 48/100