[BUG] Glob and Grep tools missing from tool palette in 2.1.117 (regression)

Just hit this bug too! thanks for filing.

Also hit the bug. Crippling for projects where bash is forbidden.
The session ends up spamming exploratory agents to find info. They also largely ignore files referenced from claude.md as a side effect.

This still reproduces in 2.1.118 (released 2026-04-23). Same behaviour — Glob and Grep absent from both the base tool palette and the deferred tools registry.

I use the workaround of directly calling the 2.1.116 version ~/.local/share/claude/versions/2.1.116

@wolffiex, I would like to reopen this issue — the 2.1.119 fix does not cover this case.

The changelog entry for 2.1.119 scopes the fix to "when the Bash tool is denied via permissions", but the original repro in this issue has no Bash denial. It still reproduces on a clean install of 2.1.119:

Environment

• claude --version → 2.1.119 (Claude Code)
• Binary: ~/.local/share/claude/versions/2.1.119 (native macOS install, arm64)
• Working directory: /private/tmp — no project, no .claude/, no MCP servers, no allowedTools filter, Bash not denied
• Model: Opus 4.7 (1M context)

Observed

• Top-level tool palette: Agent, Bash, Edit, Read, ScheduleWakeup, Skill, ToolSearch, Write — identical to the 2.1.117 repro
• Glob and Grep absent from the top-level palette
• ToolSearch select:Glob,Grep returns no matches — they are absent from the deferred registry as well, not merely deferred
• Keyword searches against the deferred registry (file search, pattern match, etc.) do not surface them either

Suggested interpretation
The 2.1.119 fix appears to have addressed one trigger (Bash denied via permissions) but not the underlying path that drops Glob/Grep from the registry entirely. The defect surfaces with zero permission configuration, which suggests the registry-population step is the root cause rather than a permission-filter side effect.

Happy to provide a debug log from this session if useful.

Still reproducible as of 2.1.126. Active tracking in #52121.

Still reproduces in 2.1.128. No change in behaviour — Glob and Grep absent from both base palette and deferred registry. New tool ShareOnboardingGuide appeared in the base palette but does not affect the issue. Active tracking in #52121.

Reporting another data point: still reproducible on Claude Code 2.1.119 on macOS.

Observed symptom on this version:

• Grep is missing from the available tool list
• when asked to search code, Claude falls back to Bash grep instead of the built-in Grep tool

This looks consistent with the tool-palette / tool-registry regression described in this issue, and suggests it persisted beyond 2.1.117.

Still missing as of 2.1.150

Also seeing this issue on 2.1.165. I noticed that it was using an awful lot of sed and awk, asked it why not use Grep and it said it wasn't available.

❯ I just updated Claude Code to 2.1.169. Is the Grep and Glob tools available now?

I'll check whether the Grep and Glob tools have come back.

Still not available. Neither shows up:

- Top-level tools this session: Agent, AskUserQuestion, Bash, Edit, Read, ScheduleWakeup, ShareOnboardingGuide, Skill, ToolSearch, Write — no Grep/Glob.
- Deferred tools (loadable via ToolSearch): I searched select:Grep,Glob and got "No matching deferred tools found."

Reproducing on v2.1.173 (VS Code extension, macOS / Apple Silicon) — still broken, ~56 versions after the v2.1.117 regression, so whatever closed the earlier reports has not landed for the extension.

Symptom: built-in Grep and Glob are absent from the tool registry. Calling them returns:

Error: No such tool available: Grep
Error: No such tool available: Glob

This is a tool-not-registered error, distinct from the deferral path's InputValidationError.

They are in neither registry, and ToolSearch can't recover them:

ToolSearch select:Grep,Glob  →  No matching deferred tools found
ToolSearch select:Read,Grep,Glob  →  returns only Read (Grep/Glob silently dropped)

The session-init deferred-tools reminder lists NotebookEdit, TodoWrite, WebFetch, WebSearch, the mcp__* families, etc. — but never Grep or Glob. Matches the 0/125 deferred tools included observation in this thread.

ENABLE_TOOL_SEARCH=false does NOT fix it (please note — this is the workaround commonly suggested):

• Set ENABLE_TOOL_SEARCH=false, fully restarted the window, confirmed printenv ENABLE_TOOL_SEARCH → false in the live shell.
• Grep/Glob still return No such tool available on the very first tool call of the fresh session.

So with tool search disabled there is no deferral machinery, yet the built-ins are still missing — which rules out tool-count-pressure deferral and points at the tool_reference loader dropping built-ins unconditionally on this build.

Not environment-specific in the ways one might guess: reproduces regardless of MCP server count (others in this thread reproduced with zero MCP servers; I have ~8 connected and see the same thing). Read, Bash, Edit, Write remain available throughout.

Impact: forces a fallback to Bash grep/rg/find, which re-introduces permission-approval friction for any path containing a space and breaks unattended/subagent search flows. The documented --tools Grep,Glob (changelog v2.1.154) is not reachable from the VS Code extension (no settings key / env / arg passthrough).

Ask: restore default loading of the built-in Grep/Glob tools on native + VS Code-extension builds, or expose a working toggle the extension can actually set. Happy to provide more detail / debug logs.

Still reproducing on 2.1.179 (macOS, Opus 4.8 1M context). This regression appears to have never been fixed — ~62 patch versions after 2.1.117 where it was introduced, the signature
is identical:

• Available base tools: Agent, Bash, Edit, Read, ScheduleWakeup, Skill, ToolSearch, Write
• Glob and Grep are absent from both the base tool list and the deferred tool set
• ToolSearch with select:Grep,Glob returns "No matching deferred tools found" — confirming they're excluded from the registry entirely, not merely deferred

Notably, my settings.json permissions.allow list explicitly references Grep(...) and Glob(...) entries, so the tools are expected to exist — they're just never registered for the
session.

Can confirm it's not IDE-specific: occurs both in the JetBrains/PhpStorm integrated terminal and standalone. Downgrading to 2.1.116 is the only known workaround, which isn't practical
this many versions later.

Could a maintainer confirm whether this is on the radar? The dynamic-tool-loading change in 2.1.117 still seems to be the culprit.

Native builds on macOS and Linux: the Glob and Grep tools are replaced by embedded bfs and ugrep available through the Bash tool — faster searches without a separate tool round-trip (Windows and npm-installed builds unchanged)

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/changelog#2-1-117

Sorry but the CHANGELOG was misleading. These [bfs and ugrep] are aliased to find and grep in Claude's shell but they are not intended to be accessed directly.

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/52476

...the removal in v2.1.117 was by design (embedded bfs/ugrep via Bash, per the changelog), but the model's own guidance and the user-facing docs were never updated to match — so the model still advertises and reaches for Glob/Grep, and users keep re-discovering the absence the hard way (hence those three separate reports over several months). Fixing the messaging — model guidance + docs (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/51781) — is what prevents further duplicates.

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/69849