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Windows: Codex shadow home fails when state_5.sqlite-shm exists as a regular file #79
Description
On Windows (REVO-VM-008, T3 0.1.10-nightly.20261112.4564), every Codex provider instance fails to start a run:
Cannot create Codex shadow home entry 'state_5.sqlite-shm' because
'C:\Users\ChrisO'Hearn\.t3\userdata\providers\codex\<instance>\shadow\state_5.sqlite-shm'
already exists and is not a symlink.
Seen on 2026-11-13 around 01:20 UTC on both codex_0aca91ff-… (ChatGPT - Pro) and codex_4ce8319d-… (ChatGPT - Revotech). With Claude also signed out on that machine, no provider can run there.
Likely cause: SQLite created state_5.sqlite-shm (and probably -wal) inside the shadow home as regular files, while the shadow-home builder expects every entry to be a symlink to the real ~/.codex and refuses to overwrite.
Suggested fix: skip SQLite sidecar files (*-shm, *-wal, *-journal) when linking the shadow home, or replace them when the main database file is a link. On Windows, also handle the case where symlink creation falls back to a copy.
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Activity
chrisohearn commentedon Nov 13, 2026
Status: still valid, unfixed. No PR touches the Codex shadow-home builder yet. Related ledger row:
fleet/windows-vm-agents(it links this issue; waiting on Claude sign-in on REVO-VM-008).Triage by the round-four GitHub hygiene pass (ledger key
r4/w7-github), 2026-11-13. Left open.chrisohearn commentedon Nov 13, 2026
Cause (inferred; not reproduced on Windows). The shadow home links
state_5.sqliteand the other top-level databases into the real.codex. SQLite's POSIX VFS resolves a symlinked database path before naming-wal/-shm, so on Linux and macOS those files land beside the real database. The Windows VFS does not resolve the link, so Codex created regular-wal/-shmfiles inside the shadow directory. The next shadow-home build refused them. The regular files also meant each shadow home had its own WAL for a database it shares with the real home, which is a corruption risk.Fix: #98.
CODEX_SQLITE_HOME=<real home>, so the databases and their sidecars live in the real home. On codex 0.167.2 this moves every top-level*.sqlite..stale-<ms>, without deleting them.The post-deploy check is Aorka script 23035, with the new expected output given in the PR body.