Across my personal gear, the bash login startup has a pretty florid
banner generated by hyfetch. This is fine for the occasional
human paced terminal shell instantiation. However, when using claude
code for agentic coding there’s a Bash tool which seems to use my
login profile. The banner is just junk that eats up the context token
budget, so I was casting about for a means to disable it when Claude
was doing the invocation. Claude swore it wasn’t using a login shell,
despite evidence to the contrary. I figured with all the agentic
coding excitement, surfacing a discussion of this point would be
relatively fruitless straightforward. Sadly I ended up a bit disappointed.
Turns out there’s a CLAUDECODE environment variable that is set to 1
for the Bash tool. I couldn’t really find any documentation other than
this acknowledgment in a GitHub issue. Thought I’d publish a note
on the Web in case someone else is struggling here as well. In any
event, the following bash snippet conserves a few tokens.
if [[ -z "$CLAUDECODE" ]]; then
if [[ -x $HOME/.local/bin/neowofetch ]]; then
neowofetch --package_managers off --package_minimal
fi
fi
Alternatively, the Claude Code documentation indicates the
ability to customize the environment through a settings.json file,
thereby allowing you to define your own flag if you’d like.