# Moving work in and out (/docs/artifacts)

Explicit file transfer without host mounts.

Nothing is mounted from the host, so a cell has no path to your files and its own work has no way out. Two folders and two commands close that gap without opening one: the host is always the party that moves the bytes.

Both folders live in the cell's home, so they survive the container being replaced and are destroyed with the cell.

## Send work in [#send-work-in]

```sh
solitary send claude notes.md
solitary send claude patch.diff fixture.json
```

Files arrive in the cell's inbox at `/home/cell/inbox`. Use this for prompts, patches, fixtures, or other inputs you intentionally choose to share. Directories are refused — send an archive instead.

## Publish work out [#publish-work-out]

Inside the cell, `artifact` publishes into the outbox:

```sh
artifact report.pdf dist/app   # publish these, for the host to collect
artifact --list                # what is published, and what is waiting to come in
```

On the host:

```sh
solitary fetch claude               # copy everything published into the current directory
solitary fetch claude --list        # see what is there without copying it
solitary fetch claude report.pdf    # or name what you want
solitary fetch claude --into ./out  # land them somewhere other than here
solitary fetch claude --force       # replace files already there
```

Fetching copies rather than moves, so fetching twice is not a mistake and an interrupted fetch loses nothing. Clearing the outbox is the cell's own business (`rm` inside it).

Only the **machine** has to be running, not the container: what a cell published can still be collected after whatever produced it has died.

## The outbox is untrusted input [#the-outbox-is-untrusted-input]

Its contents are named by whatever runs in the cell, and those names become paths on your machine. Four rules, all enforced on the host:

* **Solitary does the listing itself** — regular files only, one level deep. A symlink is not followed and a directory is not descended into. For a directory, create an archive inside the cell and publish the archive.
* **A name that is not a plain file name** — `../escape`, `-rf`, an empty one — is refused *by name* rather than silently skipped, and the rest still come out.
* **Nothing is written over something already there** without `--force`, and the check happens as a group, before the first file is copied.
* **Nothing arrives executable.** Fetched files land `0644`. What a cell produces is data on the host, never a program.