agent-signals

021. A Cursor CLI process holds its chat database open

View as Markdown Open in Claude Open in ChatGPT
Date
2026-10-30
Agents
Cursor CLI
Measured on
real machine

Measured

2026-10-30, Cursor CLI 2026.10.22-27dcf5f (nine processes) and 2026.10.01-e373342 (one process), on macOS 26.6 (arm64). Measured on: real machine. The probe probes/cursor/macos.sh read the open files with lsof and the folder names with ls. It read no conversation text.

What was measured

  1. Each interactive Cursor CLI process keeps one chat database open:

    ~/.cursor/chats/<32 hex characters>/<chat id>/store.db

    The store.db-shm and store.db-wal files of the same chat are open too. Each of the ten interactive processes held exactly one chat.

  2. The chat ID is the same as the ID of the transcript of that chat:

    ~/.cursor/projects/<project key>/agent-transcripts/<chat id>/<chat id>.jsonl

    One chat was checked by its ID in both paths.

  3. Four processes in the same folder used the same <32 hex characters> folder. Processes in other folders used other ones. Thus the hex folder depends on the working folder. The hash function is not measured.

  4. A file meta.json lies beside store.db. Its top-level fields are createdAtMs, cwd, hasConversation, schemaVersion, title and updatedAtMs.

  5. A process also keeps ~/.cursor/ai-tracking/ai-code-tracking.db open. One process kept a file ~/.cursor/projects/<project key>/terminals/<number>.txt open.

  6. sqlite3 -readonly could not open the newest store.db while its process ran: "unable to open database file".

  7. The last records of a transcript can be assistant records with tool_use content, assistant records with text, and user records with text. A transcript of this version can also hold a record {"type": "turn_ended", "status": "success"} (seen in the shape report of a diagnostic tool, one record).

Mechanism

A reader can bind a process to its transcript with no terminal screen and no folder rule: it reads the open files of the process, takes the chat ID from the store.db path, and opens the transcript with the same ID. This works when several sessions run in the same folder. meta.json gives the folder and the title of the chat.

Incident

None. Before this fact, a reader bound a Cursor CLI transcript only through the folder of a tmux pane. On a Mac with no tmux it showed no Cursor session.

Screens

None.

Not measured