Critical Freeze and Deadlock Fixes for Bash Permissions and Skill File Reloads

Three Critical Session-Freezing Bugs Eliminated

Version 2.1.73 ships targeted fixes for three distinct issues that could cause Claude Code sessions to become unresponsive or silently lose data. Each affects a different execution path, but all share the characteristic that the failure was non-obvious — sessions appeared to stall with no error message.

Bash Permission Prompt CPU Spin

The first fix addresses a scenario where Claude Code entered a 100% CPU loop and froze the terminal when displaying a permission prompt for complex bash commands. The root cause was in the permission classifier: certain command structures triggered an unbounded evaluation loop in the validation logic. Affected users would see the permission dialog appear and then the session become unresponsive, requiring a forced kill. This was particularly common with chained commands, heredocs, and multi-step pipeline expressions that appear frequently in automated or agentic workflows.

Skill File Deadlock on Mass Change

The second fix resolves a deadlock in the skill file watcher. When many skill files changed at once — the canonical trigger being a git pull in a repository containing a large .claude/skills/ directory — Claude Code's internal file-watching mechanism would attempt to acquire overlapping locks and deadlock indefinitely. The session would freeze silently without logging any error. Teams using skill-heavy setups or working in monorepos where skills are version-controlled alongside the main project were most likely to encounter this.

Bash Output Loss in Concurrent Sessions

The third fix addresses a data-loss scenario: when two or more Claude Code instances ran against the same project directory simultaneously, Bash tool output from one session could be dropped entirely. This affected multi-window workflows and CI environments where parallel Claude Code invocations are common. The fix ensures each session's output stream is isolated regardless of how many instances share the same working directory.

Additional Reliability Improvements

The release also patches a background bash process leak: processes spawned by subagents were not being cleaned up when the agent exited, allowing them to accumulate over long multi-agent sessions. Voice mode received two reliability fixes — session corruption caused by slow connections overlapping a new recording, and automatic retry logic for transient connection failures during rapid push-to-talk re-press. SSL certificate error messages now include specific remediation steps referencing NODE_EXTRA_CA_CERTS for users behind corporate proxies.