# Don't Open Claude Code With a Non-Latin Directory Name. Your Conversations Are Disappearing.

> Source: <https://dev.to/yurenpai_c188178e6b313e59/dont-open-claude-code-with-a-non-latin-directory-name-your-conversations-are-disappearing-4dhm>
> Published: 2026-06-24 19:51:03+00:00

Confirmed across 4 languages. 6 layers of impact. One root cause.

June 24. I had a 30-minute session with Claude Code in `C:\Users\...\Desktop\claude面试`

. Went back in the afternoon. Gone. `--resume`

found nothing.

I didn't delete it. I didn't run cleanup. I didn't touch `.claude`

.

Claude Code stores all conversation history under `.claude/projects/`

— one directory per project. The directory name encodes the project path.

```
简历/          → C--Users-...-Desktop---
claude面试/    → C--Users-...-Desktop-claude--
测试中文目录/  → C--Users-...-Desktop-------
```

**The Chinese characters are gone. Replaced by hyphens.** Two Chinese characters become two hyphens. Six characters become six hyphens.

To verify, I created two different directories with the same character count:

```
项目甲 (3 chars) → C--Users-...-Desktop----
测试乙 (3 chars) → C--Users-...-Desktop---- ← Same directory
```

**Two different folders — mapped to the same session directory.**

Running `claude project purge`

in `项目甲`

deleted the project directory `----`

— including all sessions from `测试乙`

. The user of `测试乙`

never knew their conversations were deleted.

Running `claude --resume`

in `测试乙`

showed `项目甲`

's conversation. Someone who has never opened that project can resume its full chat history.

I tested Japanese (`日本語テスト`

), Korean (`한국어테스트`

), and Arabic (`اختبار`

). All four languages produced the same collision. Every non-Latin script is affected.

While investigating, I found that my own `.claude/projects/`

already contained 5 hyphen-only directories with sessions from real folders — not test directories. For example, `C--Users-...-Desktop--------`

contained sessions from `C:\Users\...\Desktop\资料`

. This bug has been silently colliding sessions for as long as these directories have existed.

Claude Code's path encoding strips every non-Latin character and replaces it with a hyphen. Different directory names with the same non-Latin character count collide to the same `.claude/projects/`

entry.

```
Real path:       C:\Users\...\Desktop\测试中文目录
Encoded path:    C--Users-...-Desktop-------
                            All 6 characters → 6 hyphens
```

Anyone using directory names with **Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Russian, Hebrew, Thai** — or any non-Latin script. That's every developer who doesn't name their folders in ASCII.

At risk:

`claude project purge`

in one project silently deleting another project's conversations`--resume`

and seeing conversations from unrelated projects`autoUploadSessions`

syncing merged conversations from multiple projects to claude.ai`cleanupPeriodDays`

(default 30 days) operating on the collided directory — treating multiple projects as oneI built a free, open-source scanner that catches this before Claude Code silently loses your data. Point it at any project directory:

```
git clone https://github.com/yurenpai/ai-config-guard.git
cd ai-config-guard
node index.js .
```

It does three things:

**Checks the directory name FIRST** — if it contains non-Latin characters, you get an immediate warning with the encoded name and collision risk. This is the `NON_LATIN_DIRNAME`

rule — built from the discovery above.

**Scans your project files** — detects instructions that could make an AI coding assistant read your credentials, exfiltrate data, or execute hidden commands. 7 detection rules covering everything from `CREDENTIAL_READ`

to cross-language ambiguity.

**Runs in CI/CD** — GitHub Actions integration with SARIF export for GitHub Code Scanning.

Web dashboard included. Dark/light theme. Chinese/English bilingual. Zero dependencies beyond Node.js.

**This is the only tool that currently detects the non-Latin path encoding bug.** If your directory name has Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, or any non-Latin characters — it will tell you before Claude Code loses your conversations.

*June 25, 2026 · Discovered, tested, reported, and built a detection tool for it.*