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

A developer discovered a critical bug in Claude Code where non-Latin characters in directory names are replaced with hyphens, causing different project folders to map to the same session directory. This leads to conversation loss, session collisions, and potential data leakage across projects using Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, or other non-Latin scripts. The developer released an open-source scanner to detect the issue.

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.