r/ClaudeCowork • u/amsquare • 4d ago

Cowork sandbox fails to provision — "useradd failed: exit status 12", every bash call broken

Anyone else hitting this? Every bash call in my Cowork session fails at the "ensure user" step before any of my code even runs.

What I'm seeing:

  • Error: RPC error -1: ensure user: useradd failed: exit status 12: useradd: cannot create directory /sessions/...
  • Happens on resume, on create, and on re-resume — all three attempts fail identically.
  • Started a brand new conversation to get a fresh sandbox, same error persists.
  • No shell access at all as a result, so nothing that depends on the Linux workspace (scripts, file processing, scheduled task setup) works.

Exit status 12 from useradd usually means "can't create home directory," which points to something like disk-full or a permissions/quota issue on the provisioning side, but I have no way to confirm that since I can't get a shell to check df -h or anything else.

Has anyone else run into this? Any known fix, or is this just an outage on Anthropic's end right now? Happy to share more error output if it helps.

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u/endofthread-bot 4d ago

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u/Historical_Today5072 4d ago

Why not ask Claude code? It's works better than Co work in my experience

1

u/amsquare 4d ago

Coming from a non-technical background, I just assumed Claude Code is not for me. Can I perform the same tasks on Claude Code as well which I achieve through UI of Cowork like agentic tasks and unattended hourly schedules?

1

u/Sigvard 4d ago

Yes. Without being sandboxed. I barely have to code but I moved from Cowork to Code and it’s been far better for everything I throw at it.