[BUG] Exclamation mark is escaped

Same issue here as well. The exclamation mark escaping break every CLI that use this character. I has this problem when Claude execute HTTPie to a Graphql Endpoint:

> http --verbose --ignore-stdin POST http://localhost:4000/graphql \
  Content-Type:application/json \
  query='mutation CreateUser($input: CreateUserInput!) { createUser(input: $input) { user { id email } } }' \
  variables:='{
    "input": {
      "email": "john.doe@example.com",
      "name": "John Doe"
    }
  }'

The ! after CreateUserInput will be escaped as \\! which break the graphql syntax :( Tested on MacOS with kitty term.

I don't think this issue is related to any terminal environment.

Can confirm I just ran into this when instructing a Claude Code sub-agent to execute the following command that relies on jq for filtering GItHub CLI/API responses:

gh api "repos/{repository-owner}/{repository-name}/contents/.github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE" --jq '[.[] | select(.type == "file" and (.name | test("\\.ya?ml$")) and .name != "config.yml") | {name, download_url}]'

This results in the following error upon attempting execution:

Error: failed to parse jq expression (line 1, column 42)
         [.[] | select(.type == "file" and (.name \!= "config.yml" and .name | test("\\.ya?ml$"))) | {name, download_url}]
                                                  ^  unexpected token "\\"

I was able to work around this by changing to use .name == "config.yml" | not but I can imagine many other commands such as the ones above do not have that kind of flexibility.

I dare you to count the number of failed Bash commands due to this bug, and sum up all the tokens wasted.

Workaround: tell Claude to use a "$(cat <<EOF)" heredoc:

> use Bash() to execute: seq 3 | jq 'select(. != 2)'
but you'll need a "$(cat <<EOF)" heredoc to avoid an escaping issue with the ! character

● I'll execute that command using a heredoc to avoid the ! escaping issue:

● Bash(seq 3 | jq "select(. != 2)")
  ⎿  1
     3

Note, apparently claude-code pretty prints heredocs as quoted strings:

> Please run this tool invocation exactly as written, for contrast: Bash(seq 3 | jq "select(. != 2)")

● Bash(seq 3 | jq "select(. != 2)")
  ⎿  Error: jq: error: syntax error, unexpected INVALID_CHARACTER (Unix shell quoting issues?) at <top-level>, line 1:
     select(. \!= 2)
     jq: error: try .["field"] instead of .field for unusually named fields at <top-level>, line 1:
     select(. \!= 2)
     jq: 2 compile errors

The journal reveals the successful tool call is actually:

      {
        "type": "tool_use",
        "name": "Bash",
        "input": {
          "command": "seq 3 | jq \"$(cat <<'EOF'\nselect(. != 2)\nEOF\n)\"",
          "description": "Run seq 3 through jq filter excluding 2"
        }
      }

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Yes, this is still, embarrassingly, still happening.

This issue has been automatically closed due to 60 days of inactivity. If you're still experiencing this issue, please open a new issue with updated information.

This issue was closed incorrectly despite recent human comments. This behavior of the bot is reported at https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/16497. Please upvote that issue, so maybe it gets noticed.

this bug is absurd. And closed?

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