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DisclaimerUnofficial, and not affiliated with Anthropic. Nearly all of this is read straight out of what ships: npm bundles, captured prompts, published docs. Anthropic's own notes go in verbatim, marked as theirs. The rest is my reading, and every entry carries the strings behind it. If one looks wrong, vote it down and say why.

All of v2.1.251 Home All releases olderv2.1.250
Claude Code v2.1.251

--messaging-socket-path is now validated and fails startup instead of degrading

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Messaging not in their notes

A bad --messaging-socket-path now fails startup instead of leaving your inbox quietly broken.

--messaging-socket-path
What

When you pass an explicit socket path for peer messaging, Claude Code now checks the path and its directory up front and treats problems as startup errors rather than continuing with a quietly unusable inbox. The path must be absolute, free of .., and within the Unix socket path length limit, and the directory holding the socket must be a real directory you own privately at mode 0700, not a symlink. Key publication for peer authentication is held to the same standard.

Details
  • Missing directories are created privately, and the check refuses to descend through a directory owned by another user.
  • A directory that is a symlink rather than a real directory is rejected with --messaging-socket-path directory must be a real directory, not a symlink.
  • If authentication is required and the key peers use to authenticate cannot be published, startup fails with peers could not authenticate, so the inbox was closed. Check that the session registry directory is writable by you., where previously the failure was logged and ignored.
  • Every one of these checks is gated on the flag being passed explicitly. When the socket path is chosen for you rather than requested, a key publication failure still logs and continues as before.
Evidence

--messaging-socket-path directory must be a real directory, not a symlink, peers could not authenticate, so the inbox was closed. Check that the session registry directory is writable by you.

Strings lifted out of the shipped bundle, so the claim above can be checked against them.

Related

Other releases about the same thing. Found by shared names or similar wording; neither means one caused the other.

See this entry in the whole of v2.1.251 →