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Copilot CLI leaves behind orphaned session-state scaffold folders during aborted or incomplete session initialization/resume. #2836
Description
Activity
Still present in 1.0.84-1, on macOS — ~170 orphaned folders/month
Reproduced on macOS; the original report was Windows / 1.0.32. So this is cross-platform and still open.
Scale: 346 orphaned folders accumulated over 2 months against 2 sessions visible in the app — roughly 170/month. Each is ~3 KB, so this is not a disk-space emergency, but it is unbounded and it makes the on-disk corpus diverge badly from the app's session list.
Scaffold shape matches the original report, plus one file not mentioned there:
<uuid>/
├── workspace.yaml
├── checkpoints/index.md
├── .workspace-fork.lock <-- not in the original report
├── files/ (empty)
└── research/ (empty)
56 of 72 current orphans match this exactly. 1 had an events.jsonl.
New signal: client_name identifies the source. Every stub carries the same marker:
client_name: github/autopilot
user_named: false
summary_count: 0
fork_count: 055 of 56 were github/autopilot, 1 was github/cli. That points at the workspace-fork path rather than aborted resume alone, which may be why this has been hard to reproduce from the original steps.
Reproducible trigger: plugin installation. 19 stubs were created in a single 10-minute window matching plugin installs to the second:
| Plugin installed at | Stub created at |
|---|---|
| 06:43:58 | 06:43:15, 06:43:34 |
| 06:44:03 | 06:44:03.309 |
| 06:44:06 - 06:44:08 | 06:44:22 |
Steps to reproduce:
- Install 3-4 plugins from the marketplace.
- Compare directory names in
~/.copilot/session-state/againstSELECT id FROM sessionsin~/.copilot/data.db. - Observe scaffold folders with no corresponding session row.
Reliable detection rule: an orphan is any session-state directory with no matching row in data.db -> sessions. Safe additional guards before deleting: no events.jsonl, no session.db, no inuse.*.lock, and empty files/ and research/.
Suggested fix: remove the fork scaffold if the session is never committed to data.db, or sweep unreferenced scaffold dirs on startup.
Related: #3908 (extra empty dir on --resume), #4141 (unbounded session-state growth).
Describe the bug
Copilot CLI leaves behind orphaned session-state scaffold folders during aborted or incomplete session initialization/resume.
These folders appear under ~/.copilot/session-state and contain minimal scaffold files like workspace.yaml, checkpoints/index.md, and empty checkpoints/, files/, and research/ directories, but they do not contain real session data like events.jsonl or session.db.
This causes the on-disk session corpus to diverge from what appears in copilot --resume.
Affected version
1.0.32
Steps to reproduce the behavior
Expected behavior
Session folders should only be created once initialization is durable and valid, or they should be cleaned up automatically if startup/resume aborts or fails.
Additional context
Environment:
Observed in local session corpus:
Suggested fix: