CLI gets stuck at “Awaiting Further Direction” with no way to proceed except ESC

[imratnesh]

What happened?

While using the CLI to execute commands (related to Streamlit processes), the output shows:

Awaiting Further Direction (esc to cancel, 40s)

At this point, the CLI seems to wait for some human interaction, but no input options are provided. There is no way to respond or proceed from this state other than pressing ESC, which cancels the operation. This leads to a dead-end in the workflow.

What did you expect to happen?

Expected the CLI to either:

• Present clear options for interaction (e.g., pressing a key to continue or a prompt for further instructions), or
• Automatically continue if no user input is required, or
• Exit cleanly with a message indicating completion and next steps.

Instead, it enters an ambiguous waiting state with no meaningful way to interact.

Client information

• CLI Version: 0.1.9
• Git Commit: 34935d6
• Operating System: linux v18.19.1
• Sandbox Environment: no sandbox
• Model Version: gemini-2.5-flash
• Memory Usage: 223.5 MB

Login information

Google Account

Anything else we need to know?

[jacob314]

Thanks for reporting and sorry you are experiencing this issue. How often are you able to reproduce the issue? If you reproduce again can you see whether it eventually returns a result or hangs indefinitely? I suspect in your case the model has gotten off track reasoning about what to respond after executing the shell script resulting in this confusing behavior. I expect "Awaiting Further Direction" is just the reasoning step it was going throgh.

One think I have noticed is that Gemini CLI is surprisingly good at continuing workflows after pressing "esc". I tend to do this myself somewhat frequently when Gemini CLI runs a shell script that does not terminate or if there are network issues and the previous requests failed.
In general just typing something like "continue" as the prompt is enough to get Gemini going again.

[srithreepo]

Hi @imratnesh

Since we haven't heard back in a while I'm closing this issue at this time, Please feel free to re-open this if you are still able to reproduce this in latest. Any steps to consitently reproduce this issue will be invaluable.