Surfaced by the router dogfood: quoting the placeholder stopped the shell from
swallowing it, which moved the failure down into the CLIs — and revealed that
most of them never check the target at all. Measured:
node scanners/posture.mjs /nonexistent/path/xyz --output-file …
exit 0
Health: B (86/100) — Good shape — a few items to address
Nothing in that output distinguishes it from a real audit: well-formed
envelope, all 10 areas present, 16 opportunities reported. A typo'd path did
not fail — it flattered.
Exit 3 is the right code by the plugin's own contract: 0/1/2 are PASS/WARNING/
FAIL about a configuration that WAS examined, and every command template gates
on exactly that distinction, so a bad path flowed through the whole workflow as
a clean result.
This was a consistency gap, not a design question. Measured across the nine
target-taking CLIs, four already did it right with the same message and the
same exit code (manifest, token-hotspots-cli, whats-active, optimize-lens-cli);
five did not (scan-orchestrator and drift-cli exit 1, posture,
plugin-health-scanner and fix-cli exit 0). The five now share
lib/require-target-dir.mjs, which carries that exact behaviour. The four with
inline copies are left alone — consolidating them is a cleanup, not part of
this fix.
The guard is asserted over ALL nine CLIs, so a new one cannot join the wrong
half, and a third case is covered: a target that exists but is a regular file.
A valid target — including an empty directory — is explicitly unaffected.
Suite 1483 -> 1486, frozen v5.0.0 snapshots untouched.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01YDAwy1ZXRpZxht1wyCeSbF
