terminal hangs at login occasionally

I'm having the same problem. It seems to be cured by a reboot, but I notice two things when it has happened:

(a) The terminal screen echoes all my commands. It's as if the terminal existed in half duplex but was failing to connect to any Unix serving system.

(b) The machine hangs during shutdown with the usual rotating motif for "please wait". I have to switch it off physically to get it to recover.

Does anyone know a way of looking at what processes are running without using terminal? This might help troubleshoot it.

Does anyone know a way of looking at what processes are running without using terminal? This might help troubleshoot it.

Activity Monitor?

Process Wizard (probably not for Intel, not sure about Leopard - works fine on Tiger despite its age)

GeekTool (not sure about Leopard)

Use AppleScript, say, to run a shell script and display the output or use any of the many GUI tools which can display the output of scripts...

- cfr

sorry if this has been suggested previously.

Another option would be to try logging in over the network, via ssh. You'd have to enable it first.
this would take the terminal.app out of the picture.

I shut-down my Mac for the night. Since 10.5.2 I experienced lots of terminals stuck in "login" at
bot-up but there is something even more interesting.
I use tabbed terminals and some tabs, after a few seconds or an hour later, is gone. Unused.
Once a pair disappeared.

I got into the habit of logging off and on just after booting in the morning, then terminal
is fine all day. I use csh and haven't modified any of my setup files.

Mike-oz

I've been having this problem for awhile. I just checked that setting - as far as I can tell, it has always been disabled on my Mac.

I've used iTerm exclusively since 10.4, but I have tried the stock terminal app when I start seeing this problem - it exhibits the same symptoms. I believe it to be a problem with login or bash.

I'll try turning on ssh and seeing if i can log in like that.

Message was edited by: owlmanatt

Did anyone figure this out?

You can add my name to the list. 10.5.3 and when creating a second terminal session the app hangs.

Pathfinder's terminal implementation hangs too when trying to use it.

Sadly I don't use this enough to know if this started with 10.5.3 or not.

In my case, Terminal.app just doesn't start. Activity Monitor lists it as Not Responding taking up 95% CPU. Anyone seen this?

emersonf wrote:
In my case, Terminal.app just doesn't start. Activity Monitor lists it as Not Responding taking up 95% CPU. Anyone seen this?

Open the console. then try starting Terminal. Observe what it says in the logs, e.g. system.log, then post back.