[BUG] Search tool often does not work
Status Fixed / completed
Maintainer reply ✓ Yes — ant-kurt
Activity 4 comments · opened Aug 21, 2025 · closed Aug 22, 2025
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (ant-kurt, collaborator)
responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.
Environment
- Platform (select one):
- [x] Anthropic API
- [ ] AWS Bedrock
- [ ] Google Vertex AI
- [ ] Other: <!-- specify -->
- Claude CLI version: 1.0.86 (Claude Code)
- Operating System: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Linux 5.15.167.4-microsoft-standard-WSL2)
- Terminal: Windows 11 Terminal
Bug Description
Search tool often does not work. It's not that it never works, sometimes it does, which confuses the issue.
Steps to Reproduce
I can't give you specific steps but I can give you an example of conversation:
● Search(pattern: "utmdata\.js")
⎿ Found 0 files
● Search(pattern: "attachToForm")
⎿ Found 0 files
⎿ Interrupted by user
> use rg instead of your broken search tool
● Bash(rg -l "attachToForm")
⎿ AFFILIATE_SYSTEM_IMPLEMENTATION.md
session/views/signup.view.php
libs/js/utmdata/utmdata.jsExpected Behavior
I would have expected Search tool to find both of the phrases as easily as rg did.
Actual Behavior
Search tool found nothing and I had to tell Claude Code to use rg instead. This is a very common pattern for me.
Additional Context
This keeps happening for a while. I'm unable to tell you which update caused this, but it has been weeks and I have been waiting patiently for some update to fix it.
4 Comments
Found 3 possible duplicate issues:
This issue will be automatically closed as a duplicate in 3 days.
🤖 Generated with Claude Code
This should be working in 1.0.89. See https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/troubleshooting#slow-or-incomplete-search-results-on-wsl
We allocated more time for searches on WSL due to the file read performance degradation + improved recovery from partial searches.
@ant-kurt Hi！So are there any time limit on the search tool? I'm using claude code with a very large repository, and the default time limit might not enough to search the full repository, can I adjust the time limit by settings?
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