Interactive PTY: compound commands silently produce no output (WASI EFAULT), and shell diagnostics never reach the terminal

[jog1t]

Summary

Under an interactive PTY (terminal.open() → brush), compound commands produce no output and no error. The same constructs work through exec() and through sh -c inside the same PTY, so this is specific to brush's interactive path, not to pipelines.

Two symptoms, likely one root cause — both are writes from the interactive shell that never reach the terminal:

1. Compound commands (;, &&, |, ( ), backticks) print nothing. Redirecting stderr shows the real failure is WASI errno 21 (EFAULT) on a write.
2. brush's own diagnostics never reach the PTY at all, so an unknown command silently returns to the prompt instead of printing command not found.

Symptom 2 is what makes symptom 1 invisible: the shell is reporting an error, it just goes nowhere.

Reproduction

import { AgentOs } from "@rivet-dev/agentos-core";
import common from "@agentos-software/common";

const vm = await AgentOs.create({ software: [common] });
const shell = await vm.terminal.open({ cols: 80, rows: 24 });
const id = shell.shellId;
let buf = "";
vm.onShellData(id, (e) => { buf += Buffer.from(e?.data ?? e).toString("utf8"); });
const sleep = (ms) => new Promise((r) => setTimeout(r, ms));
await sleep(1500);

for (const c of [
  "echo one",                       // OK
  "echo b; echo c",                 // FAIL - no output
  "echo d && echo e",               // FAIL
  "echo a | cat",                   // FAIL
  "(echo sub)",                     // FAIL
  "echo `echo backtick`",           // FAIL
  "echo 'semi;colon'",              // OK  - quoted, so it is one simple command
  "sh -c 'echo b; echo c'",         // OK  - same PTY, non-interactive brush
  "nosuchcmd",                      // FAIL - no "command not found"
]) {
  buf = "";
  await vm.terminal.write(id, c + "\n");
  await sleep(3000);
  console.log(JSON.stringify(c), "=>", JSON.stringify(buf.replace(/\r/g, "")));
}

Observed:

command	interactive PTY	exec()
echo one	one	ok
uname -a	correct output	ok
echo 'semi;colon'	semi;colon	ok
sh -c 'echo a | cat'	a	ok
sh -c 'echo b; echo c'	b c	ok
echo b; echo c	nothing	ok
echo d && echo e	nothing	ok
echo a | cat	nothing	ok
(echo sub)	nothing	ok
nosuchcmd	nothing (no error)	prints error

Note echo here is a brush builtin, so the failing case involves no external command at all.

The hidden error

Redirecting stderr to a file makes both failures visible:

$ nosuchcmd 2>/tmp/e1
$ cat /tmp/e1
error: command not found: nosuchcmd

$ echo b; echo c 2>/tmp/e2
$ cat /tmp/e2
error: echo: i/o error: Bad address (os error 21)

Under wasm32-wasip1, errno 21 is EFAULT (WASI numbering, not Linux's EISDIR), so "Bad address" and the code agree. brush parsed and executed the list correctly — the write to stdout failed.

Ruled out

• Pipelines / ; themselves — exec("ls /opt/agentos/bin | head -5") returns correct output.
• The kernel PTY, fd wiring, job control — sh -c 'echo a | cat' works inside the failing interactive shell.
• stderr routing generally — a child's stderr does reach the terminal (sh -c 'echo to-stderr 1>&2' renders). Only the interactive shell's own stderr is lost.
• TERM — identical failure with TERM=xterm-256color and TERM=dumb.
• The terminal client — reproduced entirely server-side via vm.terminal.write(), no browser involved.

Where to look

_fdWrite in crates/execution/assets/runners/wasi-module.js:1404 returns EFAULT only via _writeUint32 (:413) — _mapFsError (:811) defaults to EIO, not EFAULT. So the failing path is the nwritten pointer write, or a synthetic-pipe branch, rather than a generic fs error.

crates/CLAUDE.md already documents this failure mode in the WASM host-process bridge:

child_process.poll returning ECHILD after an exit event's trailing-drain pass is terminal, not a new fault … post-exit drain loops must stop on ECHILD instead of converting a successful pipeline into WASI_ERRNO_FAULT.

Debug logging: AGENTOS_WASM_WASI_DEBUG=1 enables [agentos-wasi] traces from that runner.

Per software/CLAUDE.md ("fix portability one layer down, in the sysroot … patch the real upstream tool only as a fallback"), the fix likely belongs in the WASI/fd layer rather than in brush.

Related

• python3 not found inside pipelines or sh -c, and the pipeline returns exit 0 #1881 — adjacent but different: kernel-stub command resolution inside subshells via exec, where echo hi | head -n 1 still works. Shares the "silent failure / misleading exit code" theme.
• WasmVM brush-shell: >> append truncates and < file stdin redirection fails #1657 — other brush redirection divergences (>>, < file).
• fix(native): restore interactive shell correctness #1746 — merged; restored interactive shell correctness and added a real Brush interactive PTY suite, which is the natural harness for a regression test here.