This is a hilariously specific problem, but: right now, if you have a defunct process as some descendant of your shell and the PID of that process is the highest of any PID in your session, then new_os_window_with_cwd will fail to determine the current working directory and instead put you in ~ (or wherever you launched kitty from).

For example, this happens for me when less invokes a streaming input preprocessor ($LESSOPEN starts with |): once I have scrolled to the end of the file, the preprocessor process remains defunct until less exits, and new_os_window_with_cwd starts putting me in my home directory until I quit less.

This is ultimately due to a behaviour change in Python 3.13 (python/cpython@7407267, a backport of python/cpython#118489), so it is not reproducible on 3.12 and previous versions. The strict parameter was added to os.path.realpath in 3.10, which appears (looking at pyproject.toml) to be the earliest version kitty supports, so I think adding that is the best solution and should revert to the pre-3.13 behaviour: if the cwd of a process is unreadable, it's probably best to skip it and try a different process.

Strictly speaking, I only tested the change on line 65 (the Linux version of cwd_of_process) – I don't know if this situation is actually possible on macOS/FreeBSD, and I don't have machines available to check easily. I also don't know if the same problem could occur with abspath_of_exe, but for consistency's sake I changed the realpath invocation there in the same way, since the only callsite has a with suppress(Exception) already so is presumably expecting an exception to be raised if the symlink is unreadable.

Some repro steps for the bug this fixes:

1. Have lesspipe or similar installed (export LESSOPEN="|lesspipe.sh %s")
2. cd to some directory other than your home directory/the directory kitty opens in
3. Use less to open a file which lesspipe will process, e.g. a tar file
4. Scroll to the end of the file (G)
5. Invoke new_os_window_with_cwd and observe that you end up in your home directory, not the current directory