Action fails with ENOENT statx on symlinked .claude/CLAUDE.md when restoring from origin/main

[JoshMadsonCalder]

Summary

anthropics/claude-code-action@v1 fails during its Restoring … from origin/main (PR head is untrusted) step with an ENOENT from statx on .claude/CLAUDE.md, in a repo where that path is a git symlink (mode 120000) whose target exists.

Repro

In a repo:

• .claude/CLAUDE.md is a git symlink → ../AGENTS.md
• AGENTS.md (real file) exists at the repo root
• CLAUDE.md (root) is a git symlink → AGENTS.md

Both symlinks are well-formed on origin/main:

$ git ls-tree origin/main .claude/CLAUDE.md
120000 blob 6afa5602…	.claude/CLAUDE.md
$ git show origin/main:.claude/CLAUDE.md
../AGENTS.md
$ git ls-tree origin/main AGENTS.md
100644 blob 0fd5e530…	AGENTS.md

Workflow invocation is a vanilla anthropics/claude-code-action@v1:

- uses: anthropics/claude-code-action@v1
  with:
    anthropic_api_key: \${{ secrets.ANTHROPIC_API_KEY }}
    use_sticky_comment: true
    show_full_output: true
    claude_args: |
      --max-budget-usd 5
      --allowedTools "mcp__github_inline_comment__create_inline_comment,Bash,Read,Glob,Grep"
      --disallowedTools "Edit,Write,NotebookEdit"
    prompt: |
      REPO: \${{ github.repository }}
      PR NUMBER: \${{ github.event.pull_request.number }}
      Read and follow the instructions in .claude/REVIEW.md

Runs on ubuntu-24.04. actions/checkout@v4 with fetch-depth: 1 immediately before.

Failing log (truncated to relevant lines)

Installing Claude Code native build 2.1.169...
✔ Claude Code successfully installed!
  Version: 2.1.169
Restoring .claude, .mcp.json, .claude.json, .gitmodules, .ripgreprc,
  CLAUDE.md, CLAUDE.local.md, .husky from origin/main (PR head is untrusted)
##[error]Action failed with error: ENOENT: no such file or directory,
  statx '.claude/CLAUDE.md'
Internal error: directory mismatch for directory
  "/home/runner/work/_actions/anthropics/claude-code-action/v1/tsconfig.json",
  fd 4. You don't need to do anything, but this indicates a bug.
##[error]Process completed with exit code 1.
…
No buffered inline comments

Diagnosis (speculative)

statx follows symlinks by default. The error pattern looks like the restore step is writing the symlink blob contents (the literal string ../AGENTS.md) as a regular file at .claude/CLAUDE.md, rather than recreating the symlink — and then a later step calls statx and ENOENTs because the path resolved through that "file" isn't a real path lookup.

Either:

• The git operation used to restore from origin/main doesn't preserve symlink mode (120000), or
• Some later code path calls fs.readFile / fs.statSync after the restore but a step in between converts the symlink to a text file.

The fact that the same action runs cleanly on PRs that don't touch .claude/ (we saw success on the action's own self-setup PR before this repo gained the symlinks pattern) supports the symlink-restore being the proximate cause.

Reproduces deterministically

Confirmed on two consecutive PR head SHAs in our repo: the action failed identically on the merge commit (f5c24dc…) and on a follow-up docs-only commit (10e6232…). Both failures show the same statx '.claude/CLAUDE.md' ENOENT immediately after Restoring … from origin/main.

Workaround for now

Marking the check as advisory in branch protection. Not converting the symlinks (single-source-of-truth AGENTS.md is intentional) and not vendoring a copy.

Action version

anthropics/claude-code-action@v1 resolved via the v1 tag at the time of the runs above (timestamps 2026-06-08T23:50Z and 2026-06-09T17:03Z UTC).