agent-signals

069. The environment of an agent process names its terminal

View as Markdown Open in Claude Open in ChatGPT
Date
2026-10-31
Agents
Claude Code, Antigravity CLI, Cursor CLI
Measured on
real machine

Measured

2026-10-31, on macOS 26.6.2 (arm64): seven Claude Code processes, 13 Cursor CLI processes (2026.10.22-27dcf5f and 2026.10.01-e373342), four Cursor editor agent workers, and one agy process. The probe kit (probes/run.sh) read the terminal variables of each process with ps eww. It reads only a fixed list of names (terminal_env in probes/lib.sh), because the environment can hold secrets.

The same day, the kit ran on Ubuntu 24.04.5 (x64) with GNOME, with one Claude Code and one agy process in GNOME Terminal. Measured on: real machine.

What was measured

  1. A process in the terminal of a JetBrains IDE had TERMINAL_EMULATOR=JetBrains-JediTerm, TERM=xterm-256color and __CFBundleIdentifier=com.jetbrains.pycharm. The parent chain ended in ~/Applications/PyCharm.app/Contents/MacOS/pycharm.
  2. A process in Terminal.app had TERM_PROGRAM=Apple_Terminal, TERM_PROGRAM_VERSION=470.2 and __CFBundleIdentifier=com.apple.Terminal.
  3. A Cursor editor agent worker had no tty and no TERM. It had VSCODE_PID=<pid of the editor> and __CFBundleIdentifier=com.todesktop.230313mzl4w4u92. The workers held no chat database open (compare fact 021).
  4. One Cursor CLI process of 2026.10.01-e373342 ran, but ~/.local/share/cursor-agent/versions/ held only 2026.10.18, 2026.10.19 and 2026.10.22. The update deleted the folder of a version that a process still ran.
  5. The probe found 505 chat folders below ~/.cursor/chats/.
  6. On Ubuntu, a process in GNOME Terminal had only TERM=xterm-256color from the list. The list then had no GNOME name. The parent chain was systemd (the user manager) > gnome-terminal- > zsh > the agent. ps cuts the name gnome-terminal-server to 15 characters.

Mechanism

On Linux, the parent chain names the terminal. A reader that matches the name must accept the 15-character form gnome-terminal-. The kit now also reads VTE_VERSION, GNOME_TERMINAL_SCREEN and KONSOLE_VERSION.

__CFBundleIdentifier names the application that started the terminal, and TERMINAL_EMULATOR or TERM_PROGRAM names the terminal. A reader can use them when the parent chain is long or when the terminal program has a helper process between it and the shell.

The bundle ID of the Cursor editor is not a readable name. A reader must know it, or use VSCODE_PID and the absence of a tty, to tell an editor worker from a CLI session (fact 022).

Incident

None.

Screens

None.

Not measured