fix(linux): normalize runtime-root dir casing (LifeOS → LIFEOS) — silent memory failure on case-sensitive FS

[christauff]

Context (friendly heads-up: people are already deploying v6 on Linux!)

First — congrats on the 6.0.0 "one skill, one install" release. I picked it up within hours of the tag and installed it on Linux (Ubuntu), and it mostly came up beautifully. This PR reports one silent failure I hit during that deploy, with a fix. Sharing it partly because it's the kind of thing that only surfaces off-macOS, and you probably want to know early.

The bug: LifeOS vs LIFEOS — a case-sensitivity silent failure on Linux

The runtime is deployed to the all-caps <configRoot>/LIFEOS/ — DeployCore does this deliberately (its own comment: "Targets the config-root runtime at the ALL-CAPS <configRoot>/LIFEOS/ so it matches the @LIFEOS/... imports in CLAUDE.md"), and CLAUDE.template.md imports @LIFEOS/....

But many runtime tools and hooks resolve the root as mixed-case ~/.claude/LifeOS — e.g. const LIFEOS_DIR = join(HOME, ".claude", "LifeOS").

• On macOS (case-insensitive FS by default) LifeOS and LIFEOS are the same inode → everything works, invisible.
• On Linux (case-sensitive) they're different paths → the tools read a directory that doesn't exist and silently return empty.

Repro (Linux)

$ bun ~/.claude/LIFEOS/TOOLS/MemoryStatus.ts
Corpus:
  knowledge   no dir yet        # ← but KNOWLEDGE/ exists at LIFEOS/MEMORY/KNOWLEDGE

It's looking at ~/.claude/LifeOS/MEMORY/KNOWLEDGE (nonexistent on Linux) instead of ~/.claude/LIFEOS/MEMORY/KNOWLEDGE. No error is thrown — the corpus just appears empty, which is the dangerous part. After normalizing the path casing, MemoryStatus correctly reports the corpus.

The fix

Normalize the runtime-root path segment "LifeOS" → "LIFEOS" (the canonical DeployCore/CLAUDE.md already use) across the install-payload tools and hooks — 119 references across 91 files.

• No-op on macOS (case-insensitive), a fix on Linux — strictly safe cross-platform.
• Scoped carefully: only touches runtime-root references (.claude/LifeOS, CLAUDE_ROOT/"LifeOS", etc.). The legitimately mixed-case skills/LifeOS and install/LifeOS source-directory references are deliberately left untouched (verified).

Notes / happy to adjust

• This is the minimal, mechanical normalization. Longer term a single shared root resolver (e.g. one lifeosDir() helper the tools import, instead of each re-deriving the path) would prevent the casing from drifting again — glad to follow up with that if you'd prefer it over the flat normalization.
• PLATFORM.md lists Linux as "Fully Supported," so this seemed worth fixing rather than working around locally (a ~/.claude/LifeOS → LIFEOS symlink also masks it, but that's a band-aid).

Thanks for building and open-sourcing this — genuinely a pleasure to deploy.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[christauff]

Note for triage: the diff is a pure LifeOS→LIFEOS casing normalization (119 lines, all identical shape) — verified locally on Linux that it makes MemoryStatus/MemoryRetriever find the corpus without a symlink, and it's a no-op on macOS. If the claude-review check goes red, that's the usual fork-PR limitation (secrets/OIDC withheld from pull_request events off a fork), not the change.

[danielmiessler]

Thanks a lot for this, @christauff — really appreciate you flagging it and taking the time to write the fix.

When I went back through the current source, this turns out to already be handled: linux path-casing fix already landed in source — every PULSE runtime-root literal is all-caps LIFEOS, so the next release ships it automatically. The system has moved a fair bit since you opened this (the PAI → LifeOS rename and a few subsystem rewrites), so the gap you spotted has since been closed independently.

Going to close this one out on that basis — but genuinely grateful for the contribution. 🙏