Claude Code persists conversation history to disk so you can resume where you left off. Session management is handled through CLI flags on the mainDocumentation Index
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claude command and the /resume slash command inside an interactive session.
Resuming sessions
Continue the last session
Pick up exactly where you left off in the current directory:Resume by session ID
Pass a specific session UUID to jump directly into that conversation:Open the interactive picker
Omit the ID to browse past sessions in an interactive list, with optional search:Resume a conversation. Provide a session ID to resume directly, or a search
term to pre-filter the interactive picker, or omit the value entirely to open
the picker with no filter.
Continue the most recent conversation in the current directory. Equivalent to
--resume with the ID of the last session.When resuming, create a new session ID instead of reusing the original. Use
together with
--resume or --continue to branch off a copy of the
conversation.Disable session persistence for this run — the session will not be saved to
disk and cannot be resumed. Only works with
--print.Use a specific UUID for the new session. Must be a valid UUID and must not
already exist. When used with
--resume or --continue, --fork-session
must also be specified.Set a display name for this session. The name is shown in the
/resume
picker and in the terminal title.The /resume slash command
Inside an interactive session, run /resume (aliased as /continue) to open
the session picker without leaving the CLI:
Clearing the current session
The/clear slash command (aliased as /reset and /new) clears the current
conversation history and frees up context, starting a fresh turn within the
same process:
Session storage
Sessions are stored as JSONL transcript files under:cleanupPeriodDays setting
(default: 30) controls how long transcripts are retained before being deleted
at startup.
~/.claude/settings.json
cleanupPeriodDays to 0 to disable session persistence entirely.