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terminal hangs at login occasionally

Hi,

So this has now happened twice. When opening a new terminal window, or new tab, the terminal will just hang at the 'login' process. It will never actually present a prompt. Quitting terminal and restarting did no good. Also, perhaps related, I had to do a hard shutdown, as it hung during the restart process.

Mac Mini (core duo), MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.2)

Posted on Feb 13, 2008 3:16 PM

Reply
23 replies

May 12, 2008 3:07 AM in response to Berndt Jung

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.

May 14, 2008 3:32 PM in response to xgretsch

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

May 15, 2008 7:53 PM in response to Berndt Jung

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

May 20, 2008 6:38 AM in response to Gnarlodious

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

terminal hangs at login occasionally

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