-p/--prompt values starting with - incorrectly parsed as flags (regression in 1.0.85)
Nobody has claimed this yet.
Assessment
- Difficulty
- 3/5
- Estimated time
- 1-2 days
- Newbie friendliness
- 75/100
Research direction
Start at the CLI argument-parsing entry point and reproduce the issue with the bundled app.js using -p followed by a value beginning with '-'. Compare that behavior with the working --prompt= form; done means both forms accept a single argv value beginning with '-' without the misleading quoting error.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Description
Describe the bug
-p/--prompt values that begin with a - character (e.g. a prompt whose text starts with YAML frontmatter like ---) are misparsed as CLI flags instead of the prompt value. This produces a misleading error telling the user their prompt "was not quoted", even when the prompt was passed correctly as a single argv element (no shell involved).
This is a regression: the same invocation works correctly on 1.0.80 and 1.0.81, and fails starting at 1.0.85.
Affected version
1.0.85
Steps to reproduce the behavior
Reproduced without any shell involvement (Python subprocess.run with an argv list), ruling out shell quoting/word-splitting as the cause:
import subprocess
p = "---\nfoo bar baz"
r = subprocess.run(["copilot", "--allow-all", "-p", p], capture_output=True, text=True)
print(r.returncode, r.stderr)
Output:
error: Invalid command format.
It looks like your prompt was not quoted, so the extra words were treated as separate arguments.
Wrap the prompt in quotes, for example: copilot -p "your prompt here"
Try 'copilot --help' for more information.
Minimal repro also confirmed directly on the command line:
copilot --allow-all -p '---
foo bar baz'
# -> error: Invalid command format. ...
copilot --allow-all -p 'hello world'
# -> works fine
Binary search on a real ~9KB multi-line prompt (a persona file with YAML frontmatter) showed the failure boundary was exactly at the leading -- characters of the --- frontmatter delimiter — i.e., any -p value starting with - triggers it, regardless of length or content afterward.
Expected behavior
-p/--prompt <text> should accept any string value passed as a single argv element, including one that begins with - or --, without misinterpreting it as a flag. This worked correctly through at least 1.0.81.
Workaround
Using the = form avoids the bug entirely:
copilot --allow-all --prompt='---
foo bar baz'
# -> works fine, same content
Additional context
- This broke a real workflow: a Rust CLI tool that shells out to
copilotviastd::process::Commandwith.arg("-p").arg(&prompt)(two separate argv elements, not a single string with embedded spaces). The prompt content is a file that begins with YAML frontmatter (---\n...\n---), which is a common and reasonable convention. - Confirmed via direct testing against the bundled
app.jsfor each version (node app.js --allow-all -p '---\nfoo bar baz'):1.0.80: succeeds1.0.81: succeeds1.0.85: fails with the "was not quoted" error
- Root cause appears to be in the CLI's arg-parsing layer (clap-based) treating any
-p/--promptvalue starting with-as an unrecognized flag/subcommand, which then trips a heuristic (added to produce a friendlier error message for genuinely unquoted multi-word shell invocations) that misfires here because the value was in fact passed correctly as a single argument — it just happens to start with a dash.
Fix applied on our end
We worked around this by switching our call site from -p <value> (two args) to --prompt=<value> (single arg), which avoids the parser's flag-detection heuristic. Filing this so the underlying regression can be fixed and the workaround isn't required.
- Dominant language
- Shell
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- Merged PRs (30d)
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Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
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