A Claude Code environment variable, read out of the shipped bundle.
It has been in the build since v2.1.169, including the newest one read.
Set to 1 to force transcript persistence, prompt history, and claude agents registration even when this claude was launched from inside another Claude Code session. Use when an inherited CLAUDE_CODE_CHILD_SESSION value, for example from a screen session or a background launcher first started by Claude Code's Bash tool, causes a genuine top-level session to be misclassified as nested. As of v2.1.178, Claude Code detects the tmux case automatically and ignores the inherited marker, so tmux no longer needs this variable. Also honored on v2.1.169 and earlier; has no effect on v2.1.170 and v2.1.171, where the nested-session detection it overrides was removed
No release's published evidence quotes this name. The ledger indexes the Evidence lines of every changelog on this site, so this says nobody here has ever quoted it; it says nothing about how old the name is.
Presence across releases
3
BuildsHow manyDatesReading
v2.1.1691 build8 Jun 2026 ◆in the build
v2.1.1701 build9 Jun 2026 ○not in the build
v2.1.172 – v2.1.308119 builds10 Jun 2026 → 22 Oct 2026 ◆in the build
Build by build
121
One row per release since the first build this name was read out of. Absent means the build was read and the name was not in it, never mined means no bundle for that release was ever archived, and a declared type or a default is only ever what that release's own bundle stated.
v2.1.29914 Oct 2026·presentverdict: present · bool
v2.1.30014 Oct 2026·presentverdict: present · bool
v2.1.30115 Oct 2026·presentverdict: present · bool
v2.1.30216 Oct 2026·presentverdict: present · bool
v2.1.30318 Oct 2026·presentverdict: present · bool
v2.1.30419 Oct 2026·presentverdict: present · bool
v2.1.30520 Oct 2026·presentverdict: present · bool
v2.1.30621 Oct 2026·presentverdict: present · bool
v2.1.30721 Oct 2026·presentverdict: present · bool
v2.1.30822 Oct 2026·presentverdict: present · bool
Read out of the published npm bundle release by release, and out of Anthropic's own documentation as this site captured it. Nothing on this page is a description anybody here wrote about what the environment variable does. All environment variables.
