fixed: agent subcommands

[Samarthsinghal28]

Relates to

ELI2-187 – CLI: elizaos agent some commands fail or hang

Risks

Medium – This change touches core CLI behavior for managing agents. Potential risks include:

• Breaking expected behavior for other agent commands.
• Introducing regressions for agent name parsing or subprocess management.
• Hanging or crashing the CLI during agent lifecycle operations.

Background

What does this PR do?

This PR fixes an issue where elizaos agent subcommands (stop, start, remove, set) would hang or silently fail when executed for specific agent names. The root cause was traced to:

• Incorrect parsing/validation of agent names with dashes or special characters.
• Improper handling of subprocess return codes and exceptions.

This update:

• Normalizes agent name inputs consistently across subcommands.
• Adds error handling and timeouts to subprocess calls.
• Improves logging for easier debugging of future failures.

What kind of change is this?

• Bug fixes (non-breaking change which fixes an issue)
• Improvements (misc. changes to existing features)

Documentation changes needed?

• ✅ My changes do not require a change to the project documentation.

Testing

Where should a reviewer start?

Start by reviewing the changes to cli/agent.py and the updated subprocess handling logic. Also check new unit tests under tests/test_cli_agent.py.

Detailed testing steps

1. Create an agent using UI.

2. Run the following commands and verify each executes successfully:

   • elizaos agent stop -n test-agent
   • elizaos agent start -n test-agent
   • `elizaos agent set -n test-agent -f config.json
   • elizaos agent remove -n test-agent

3. Try same commands with malformed or non-existent agent names and confirm appropriate error messages are shown.

Output :

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[monilpat]

LGTM