No Terminal, No Activity monitor

I am a new Mac user, rMBP. I really like it, and I'm happy to be a Mac user now. However, it has come with frustrations that seem to not plague anyone else, as my intensive Google searching shows me. Yuck. Not impressed with this, Apple.

With vanilla booted OS X Mavericks, I had (and still have) NO Activity Monitor. Don't bother telling me where to "find" it. I'm not mentally impaired. It simply doesn't exists anywhere on my OS. I'm mad. (Please understand, even assume, that I haven't come here as a first resort. I've raped Google trying to find solutions).

Next. I install OS X Yosemite Beta directly from Apple. I want to empty Trash. There are a handful of video files in it. It tells me they're "In Use". This is not true. a Command + Options + Esc ensures this. I am literally just running Chrome, Finder, and Messages.

So I Google a little, decide to give this command a try:
#!/bin/bash
echo "Looking..."
lsof | grep Trash

Then I find out, I no longer have Terminal anywhere on my OS! I remember seeing Terminal when I was looking around the first day of my Macbook Pro running OS X Mavericks. Cooooooooooooooooooooooool. -_-

So, look, any help would be great. Please no snoody comments. This is my first post. I don't like when things don't work the way they're meant to.

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Mavericks (10.9.4), Running Yosemite Beta

Weaselboy said:

If you have a standard Mavericks install and nobody has mucked about in there and deleted things on you, Terminal and Activity Monitor would be installed in /Applications/Utilities by default.

Try this.... click on your desktop to bring focus to the Finder then hit shift-command-u (all three keys at once). That should bring up the /Applications/Utilities folder and if you scroll down there you should see both Terminal and Activity Monitor in the folder. If they are gone, then somehow someone deleted them. I can't think of any way they would have gotten deleted on their own.

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When doing this, it says "The operation cannot be completed because the item cannot be found." This is effed up. If I do a reinstall... can I reinstall Yosemite? I really like it. And it's from the Apple webpage (not some hacked copy)... and how do I "reinstall" the OS I am currently running?

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Anonymous Freak said:

Without more detail, there's no way to determine what is going wrong - but if you have core utilities disappearing, then something is very wrong.

Since you no longer have Terminal access, and what I'm going to suggest requires terminal access, hopefully you have another machine you can connect from. If so, turn on SSH (In Settings -> Sharing) and SSH in to your Mac.

Code:

cd /Applications/Utilities
ls -a

Look for Terminal.app and/or Activity Monitor.app. See if they have become hidden. There was a bug in a developer preview a few years ago that started hiding things improperly.

Other than that, I'd say you need a reinstall of the OS.

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Does this other computer need to be running OS X? Or will Windows do? And what is SSH--I don't see anything like that in Sharing...

Edit: I used iTerm for that code... says "no such file or directory"...oh yeah, effing hell, I forgot I couldn't find Utilities to begin with yesterday. OK OK OK so I'm going to reinstall. How the heck do I do that? Can I keep Yosemite? I had downloaded it when I had Mavericks; now when I use Finder, there is no file named Yosemite. Do I need to just download it again? Or do I have to revert to Mavericks, then if everything is cool, then try Yosemite again?

Edit 2: and as far as "backing up"... should I just move stuff I want onto a flash drive, like some video files and my epic 20 pictures of ralph mcquarrie concept art folder for my wallpapers or will all of that stay on here (is it going to get erased?)? When I upgraded to Yosemite everything was As Is from how I had it on Mavericks... that is, except for my Utilities folder -_-

Weaselboy said:

It sounds like the entire /Applications/Utilities folder is gone somehow. No idea how that happened. You are running test software with Yosemite, so maybe that has something to do with this happening. I have never seen this on Mavericks.

If you want a hassle free OS experience at this point you would in my view be better off sticking with Mavericks and wait until Yosemite is finalized.

You could try just going back to the App Store and downloading Yosemite again and reinstalling it. That should put the Utilities folder back.

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I think that's what I'll do. Thanks a lot friend!