Command Output Errors: head: |: No such file or directory and head: cat: No such file or directory

[mdunn79]

Bug Description

When running commands in the AI Assistant's terminal that produce structured output (like JSON), the output is not displayed correctly. Instead, errors like head: |: No such file or directory and head: cat: No such file or directory appear.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Open Cursor
2. Start a conversation with the AI Assistant
3. Run a command that produces structured output, for example:

   aws sts get-caller-identity
   

4. Observe that instead of the expected JSON output, errors appear:

   head: |: No such file or directory
   head: cat: No such file or directory
   

Expected Behavior

The command output should be displayed correctly, showing the full JSON or multi-line output. For example:

{
    "UserId": "AROAURXNBDKWWICRX5IA6:[email protected]",
    "Account": "123456789012",
    "Arn": "arn:aws:sts::123456789012:assumed-role/ExampleRole/[email protected]"
}

Actual Behavior

Instead of the command output, errors related to head and cat are displayed:

head: |: No such file or directory head: cat: No such file or directory

Environment

• Cursor Version: 0.50.5
• OS: macOS 24.5.0
• Shell: Bash
• AWS CLI Version: 2.9.14 (if applicable)

Additional Context

• This issue only occurs with commands that produce structured or multi-line output
• Simple commands (like echo hello or aws --version) work correctly
• The issue appears to be in how the AI Assistant's terminal environment handles command output
• The errors suggest the backend is trying to process the output using head or cat incorrectly
• This is not related to the user's shell configuration (.bash_profile, .bashrc, etc.)

Impact

This issue significantly impacts the user experience when:

• Working with AWS CLI commands
• Running any command that produces structured output (JSON, YAML, etc.)
• Trying to view multi-line command output

Workaround

The only current workaround is to redirect output to a file and then read the file:

aws sts get-caller-identity > output.txt 2>&1
cat output.txt

This is cumbersome and disrupts the workflow.

Additional Notes

• This issue affects all commands that produce structured output, not just AWS CLI commands
• The problem appears to be in the AI Assistant's terminal environment, not the user's shell configuration
• The errors suggest the backend is trying to process command output in a way that's causing these errors

[anthonymobile]

was troubleshooting this and cursor seemed to think it was realted to bash-my-aws which i removed to no luck

[cesdperez]

bump

[soda29]

Having this problem for a while as well.

[shonnly]

Same problem just started occurring this morning, which makes working with Cursor pretty useless for my AWS environment as it fails to run any commands using AWS CLI, especially when I want it to tail logs when debugging issues in my app.

[shonnly]

fixed!

I was able to debug and fix my issue using Cursor itself, which is kinda cool. Here the relevant part of the conversation which solved it:

Here’s what I found from your environment and shell configuration: Your environment variables include:

PAGER=head -n 10000 | cat

This means any command that uses the $PAGER environment variable (including the AWS CLI by default) will try to pipe its output through head -n 10000 | cat. This is not a standard pager value and is likely the cause of the error messages:

head: |: No such file or directory head: cat: No such file or directory

• Your ~/.zshrc does not set this value, so it may be set elsewhere (possibly by your terminal, VS Code, or another shell config).

How to fix: You can override this for AWS CLI commands by setting the AWS_PAGER environment variable to an empty string, which disables paging:

AWS_PAGER="" aws logs describe-log-groups

Or, you can unset the PAGER variable for your session:

unset PAGER

Would you like me to try running an AWS CLI command with AWS_PAGER="" to confirm this resolves the output issue?

YES!

Setting AWS_PAGER="" successfully resolved the output issue! The AWS CLI output is now displayed directly in the chat, with no errors.

Summary: The problem was caused by the environment variable PAGER being set to head -n 10000 | cat, which is not a valid pager command for most CLI tools. Overriding this with AWS_PAGER="" disables paging for AWS CLI commands and allows output to display correctly.

From now on, I will prepend AWS_PAGER="" to all AWS CLI commands to ensure you see the output directly. If you want to make this change permanent, you can add the following line to your ~/.zshrc:

export AWS_PAGER=""

[MatthewCroxton]

By extension, setting that PAGER environment variable to "" resolves issues with GitHub CLI output too.

[lightpriest]

Assuming Cursor had set this PAGER as a safe-limiter for long outputs, I tried to maintain the same behavior and have it work regardless of the command being used.

So, an ugly hack, but should probably work for any "PAGER" dependent program - without the risk of blowing up the context window.

# In your shell profile of choice (.zshrc?)
if test "$PAGER" = "head -n 10000 | cat"; then
  export PAGER='head -n 10000'
fi

If head and cat write the same way to STDOUT, there's no tty magic happening. I think it should behave the same for most if not all of the relevant cases.

[neongreen]

I think turning off the "legacy terminal tool" resolves it