# I got tired of logging in and out of Claude Code, so I built a one-command account switcher > Source: > Published: 2026-10-03 11:25:10+00:00 Quick confession: last week I logged out of my work Claude Code account four times in one afternoon. Nothing was broken. I just have a second account for personal projects, and Claude Code can only be logged into one of them at a time. Sign in with the personal account and the work one is gone. Sign back in with work and personal is gone. Every switch is a browser tab, an OAuth dance and about forty seconds of my life. Multiply that by "I switch contexts a lot" and you get a genuinely annoying week. So I fixed it. The result is **cc-switch**, and the whole thing is one command: ``` ccp use personal ``` Every `claude` you launch after that runs under the personal account. `ccp use work` flips it back. No re-login, no browser, no forty seconds. And `ccp list` tells you who is who: ``` Claude Code profiles -------------------- * default alice@company.com personal [shared] alice@gmail.com client-x [isolated] alice@client-x.com ``` I expected to need something hacky with credential files. I didn't. Claude Code reads an environment variable called `CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR` and uses it as the root for *everything* it stores: credentials, settings, session transcripts, the lot. Point it at a different folder and you get a completely separate identity. So a "profile" in cc-switch is literally a directory: ``` ~/.claude-profiles/ personal/ ← its own login client-x/ ← its own login ~/.claude ← your original account, untouched ("default") ``` `ccp use ` sets the variable for the current shell *and* persists it for new terminals. `ccp run ` sets it for a single invocation only, which means two terminals can talk to two different accounts at the same time: ``` # terminal 1 ccp run work # terminal 2 ccp run personal -p "summarise yesterday's changes" ``` I use that far more than I expected to. The first version worked great for about ten minutes. Then I opened a project under the personal profile and my conversation history was empty. Of course it was: transcripts live in `projects/` inside the config dir, and the new profile had its own brand new, empty one. For some setups that's exactly what you want (a clean-room profile for a client). For my day-to-day it was terrible. I wanted the *login* separated, not my memory of what I was doing yesterday. The fix turned out to be clean. On a **shared** profile, cc-switch replaces the chat folders (`projects/`, `sessions/`, `plans/`, `tasks/`, `file-history/`) and `history.jsonl` with links back into `~/.claude`: NTFS junctions and a hardlink on Windows, plain symlinks on Linux and macOS. Credentials and settings stay per profile, chats are one pool, and `claude --resume` shows the same list whichever account you're on. If you *do* want a walled-off environment, you just say so: ``` ccp add client-x --isolated ``` You can flip a profile between the two modes later with `ccp link` and `ccp unlink`. Nothing gets deleted either way: `unlink` gives the profile its own empty folders and leaves the shared history where it is. This is the part I actually want people to read, because it's a general Windows/PowerShell gotcha. My first `ccp remove` was the obvious thing: `Remove-Item -Recurse -Force `. On a *shared* profile, that directory is full of junctions pointing at `~/.claude`. And `Remove-Item -Recurse` will happily walk straight through a junction and delete the contents of the target. In other words, "remove the test profile" would have wiped my entire real chat history. I only caught it because I was being paranoid in testing: I made a throwaway profile and counted the project folders on both sides before and after. The fix is to delete the links themselves first (`DirectoryInfo.Delete()` on a junction removes only the reparse point, not what it points to) and *then* recurse into whatever is left. `rm -rf` on Linux doesn't follow symlinks, so the bash version was never at risk, but it does the same explicit dance anyway. If you write any tool that creates junctions on Windows: test your delete path against a directory you'd be sad to lose. I got lucky. You might not. One line, no clone: **Windows (PowerShell)** ``` irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/petersonsenadevs/claude-code-switch/main/install.ps1 | iex ``` **Linux / macOS** ``` curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/petersonsenadevs/claude-code-switch/main/install.sh | bash ``` Then: ``` ccp add personal # new profile, shares your chats ccp login personal # opens claude: sign in, then /exit ccp use personal # you're switched ccp list # every profile, with the email signed in on each ``` It's plain shell (a PowerShell module and a bash script) with no dependencies and no daemon. It doesn't wrap or patch `claude`; it only sets a variable the CLI already respects. Profile names autocomplete with Tab, and `ccp update` pulls the latest version when there is one. `ccp list` shows the right account on each profile (or doesn't), I'd really like to hear about it in an issue.`--resume` behave. `settings.json` and MCP configs stay per profile on purpose. Would you share anything else? The repo is here: **[github.com/petersonsenadevs/claude-code-switch](https://github.com/petersonsenadevs/claude-code-switch)**, MIT licensed. If it saves you the forty seconds, a star helps other people find it.