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Claude Code install errors, reproduced: EACCES, a 600s mirror stall, Node 20 silently getting an old version, a region-block install.sh, and the native installer removing your npm copy

I reproduced every Claude Code install failure I could on macOS: 15 verbatim errors, each with wall time and exit code. npm -g into /usr/local fails with EACCES, exit 243. A cache dir that is merely 0555 gets blamed on root-owned files, with sudo chown advice. From Beijing, npmmirror took 147s and then >600s, npmjs 11-12s (2 samples each). On Node 20, an unpinned install silently lands on 2.1.197. Fetching claude.ai/install.sh from a blocked region gives curl exit 0 and a 447 KB HTML page. The native installer runs npm uninstall -g on your npm copy without saying so; it removed mine.