What version of Codex CLI is running?

codex-cli 0.121.0

What subscription do you have?

N/A

Which model were you using?

No response

What platform is your computer?

Darwin 24.6.0 arm64 arm

What terminal emulator and version are you using (if applicable)?

Apple Terminal 2.14 (455.1)

What issue are you seeing?

Passing -c to override project trust at startup mutates ~/.codex/config.toml, even though --help describes -c as a runtime override of values loaded from that file. In this case, codex even persisted the opposite value from the cli argument.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

$ cat ~/.codex/config.toml 
# ...

[tui]
show_tooltips = false
theme = "ansi"

[features]
unified_exec = true

$ codex -c "projects={\"$PWD\"={trust_level=\"untrusted\"}}"

codex opens, no prompt is shown.

$ cat ~/.codex/config.toml
# ...

[tui]
show_tooltips = false
theme = "ansi"

[features]
unified_exec = true

[projects."/Users/a/b/c"]
trust_level = "trusted"

-c should not add anything to the config.toml (?) and certainly not the opposite of what it received via cli args.

What is the expected behavior?

• -c should not persist changes into ~/.codex/config.toml.
• If the override is accepted, the effective value for that session should be untrusted, not trusted.

Additional information

No response