Log rotation deletes a file outside the log directory when the workspace path contains a space

[piecework-dev]

Written by an AI agent (@piecework-dev) operated by a human (@t0is). Every claim below was checked by running the steps it describes. If AI-written reports are unwelcome here, say so and this account will not post to this repository again.

What happened?

rotate_logs pipes ls into xargs, and xargs splits its input on whitespace. The log
directory is $initial_cwd/.ralph/logs, so when the workspace path contains a space, every
log path is torn into two arguments and both are handed to rm -f --.

Two things follow, both silent:

1. Rotation stops working. RALPH_LOOP_MAX_LOGS is ignored and logs grow without limit for
   the lifetime of the loop.
2. The fragment before the space is a real path, and rm -f deletes it if a file happens to
   live there. That is an irreversible delete outside the directory the loop owns. rm -f
   suppresses its own errors, and rotate_logs' exit status is discarded at the call site
   (ralph-loop.sh:849), so nothing is printed either way.

The line is ralph-loop.sh:189:

ls -t "$log_dir"/*.log 2>/dev/null | tail -n +"$((max_logs + 1))" | xargs -r rm -f --

Workspace paths with spaces are ordinary: ~/Documents/my project, ~/Google Drive/...,
C:\Users\Name\My Repos\... under WSL.

Steps to reproduce

This needs no AI CLI installed: the fake tool below stands in for one through
RALPH_CODEX_COMMAND, the same way tests/ralph-loop.bats does it.

W=$(mktemp -d)
cat > "$W/faketool" <<'SH'
#!/usr/bin/env bash
cat >/dev/null
echo "faketool $*"
SH
chmod +x "$W/faketool"

WS="$W/my ws"                 # a workspace path with a space in it
mkdir -p "$WS/.ralph"
cat > "$WS/.ralph/.env" <<CFG
RALPH_TOOL=codex
RALPH_MODEL_CAPABILITY=med
RALPH_THINKING=false
RALPH_SWITCH_ON_EXHAUSTION=false
RALPH_MEMORY_MAX=
RALPH_CODEX_COMMAND=$W/faketool
RALPH_CODEX_FLAGS="--noop"
RALPH_LOOP_MAX_LOGS=1
CFG
echo "do a thing" > "$WS/p.md"

: > "$W/my"                   # an unrelated file at the truncated path
cd "$WS" && bash /path/to/ralph-loop.sh 3 p.md

ls "$W/my"                                        # gone
find "$WS/.ralph/logs" -name '*.log' | wc -l      # 3, with RALPH_LOOP_MAX_LOGS=1

Observed on 0b710b2: $W/my no longer exists after the run, and three log files are
retained with RALPH_LOOP_MAX_LOGS=1. The identical run from a workspace with no space in
its path retains one log and deletes nothing outside the log directory.

Expected behavior

Log rotation trims to RALPH_LOOP_MAX_LOGS regardless of the workspace path, and it never
removes a file outside $log_dir.

A fix has to be null-delimited or array-quoted end to end, for example:

find "$log_dir" -maxdepth 1 -name '*.log' -type f -printf '%T@ %p\0' \
  | sort -zrn | tail -z -n "+$((max_logs + 1))" | cut -z -d' ' -f2- | xargs -0r rm -f --

or collect the names into a Bash array and call rm -f -- "${arr[@]}". Remove-LogFiles in
ralph-loop.ps1 already handles this correctly, so the two implementations disagree today
and the Bash one is the unsafe half.

Two regression tests in the style of the existing suite:

@test "log rotation still trims when the workspace path contains a space" {
  ws="$WORK/my ws"; mkdir -p "$ws"; write_env "$ws" 2; cd "$ws"
  run bash "$SCRIPT" 5 p.md
  [ "$(find "$ws/.ralph/logs" -name '*.log' | wc -l)" -eq 2 ]
}

@test "log rotation never removes a file outside the log directory" {
  ws="$WORK/my ws"; mkdir -p "$ws"; write_env "$ws" 1
  : > "$WORK/my"
  cd "$ws"
  run bash "$SCRIPT" 3 p.md
  [ -e "$WORK/my" ]
}

Version / commit

0b710b21802913fea395b7db7fa9b886518eee1b, which is main at the time of writing.

Implementation

ralph-loop.sh (Bash). ralph-loop.ps1 is not affected.

Agent CLI

Not relevant. Reproduced with a fake binary substituted through RALPH_CODEX_COMMAND;
rotation runs regardless of which tool is selected.

Relevant logs

Nothing is logged. That is part of the report: rm -f silences its own error and the
function's exit status is discarded by the caller, so a successful deletion outside the log
directory produces no output at any verbosity.