Terminal doesn't work?

[guitargoddsjm]

I've been trying to run some commands in Terminal, but it just doesn't work. After I type in a sudo or cd (or anything for that matter), it just doesn't respond. No errors, no response, no password requests, nothing...

I've restarted the application multiple times, deleted the plist, and sent a hard reset... Nothing seems to be working!

Screenshot:

 

[calderone]

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.

 

[Hal Itosis]

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).