Terminal doesn't work?

This often happens when there is command that is hung or has not completed.

Have you quit Terminal recently while in the middle of a command? If so, check Activity Monitor for that command and kill it.

You can also try removing, .bachrc, .bash_profile from ~/ if you have them.

 

According to the window's titlebar, Terminal is still executing the login command.

If this is on 10.6, there have been cases where some of the "HFS+ compressed" items in /bin, /sbin and /usr have been corrupted.

If so, there is a binary (mentioned here: "rsync and hfs+ compressed files damaged") which will search for and list such items. Unfortunately, it was designed with a working Terminal in mind. Perhaps we can use AppleScript though:

do shell script "/full/path/to/find_sl_damaged_files > ~/Desktop/report.txt"

...where the user will need to supply the proper "/full/path/to" part [after downloading the binary].


EDIT: hmm, or perhaps Terminal's "New Command..." menu item would still be workable (without a login shell).