fix(skills): allow absolute skill paths that resolve within trusted directories (#59824)

[webtecnica]

Summary

P1 — Silent failure in production. Cron jobs with absolute skill paths (e.g. symlinked trading-skills repos at /home/hermes/agent-trading-skills/...) were silently rejected by _skill_lookup_path_error(), which blocked ALL absolute paths.

The cron appeared healthy (Last run: ok) but delivered degraded/empty responses because every tick's skill loads failed. The user saw "audit channel went silent."

Fix

Changed _skill_lookup_path_error() from a hard rejection of ALL absolute paths to a trusted-root validation:

• Absolute paths resolving within HERMES_HOME/skills/ or HERMES_HOME/profiles/*/ are allowed
• All other absolute paths (/etc/passwd, /tmp/...) are still rejected
• .. traversal and Windows drive paths still blocked
• Symlinks are resolved before checking the prefix

Files Changed

File	Δ
tools/skills_tool.py	+14/-1 lines

Verification

• 11 behavioral assertions for edge cases (relative, traversal, trusted absolute, untrusted absolute, Windows drives)
• 89 existing tests: ✅ all passed

Closes #59824

[webtecnica]

@teknium1 P1 fix — cron jobs with absolute skill paths were silently failing (no Discord delivery). Now allows absolute paths that resolve within Hermes trusted directories. 14 lines, 89 existing tests pass. 🙏

[webtecnica]

@teknium1 Consolidated ping on this one — all 50 PRs from webtecnica are rebased on latest main, zero conflicts. This P2 fix (12 lines, vision fallback for text-only models) is among them. 🙏

[teknium1]

Thanks for the focused report and security-preserving intent. This is an automated hermes-sweeper review; the cron-path behavior is already implemented on current main.

• 62972060caaa9f7f3fc5a58688757fdd59b9a117 (fix(cron): normalize absolute skill paths before skill_view (#59824)) landed the fix for this issue.
• cron/scheduler.py:2392-2393 normalizes each cron skill identifier before calling skill_view.
• agent/skill_utils.py:543-568 accepts the active skill root and configured skills.external_dirs, preserves lexical symlink paths, and leaves untrusted absolute paths for skill_view to reject.
• tests/cron/test_scheduler.py:2968-2987 covers the absolute-path cron regression.

Closing as implemented on main.