Q: Terminal is COMPLETELY blank. Sits at "login" and nothing works.

Try typing control-C or control-D.

Create a new account and see if it behaves the same way. If not, reboot the machine to get your account working again, then copy over the bash init files from the other account.

Same problem here, has happened 3 times in the last two weeks. Running 10.6.1.

Same problem here...

Image: !http://www.enabl3dtech.com/terminal.png!

The window title in the screen shots suggests that the problematic process is "login".
While the blank Terminal window is open, please check (by using Activity Monitor.app) whether "login" has not yet finished or your shell (such as bash) has already been started.

If you think the problem is in "login", then you can bypass it by:

Go to Preferences > Startup,
enable "command (complete path)",
and enter /bin/bash (or your favorite shell) into the text box.

Does this make any difference?
By the way, are you using Active Directory or such?

Ok - checked activity monitor, no shell has been started (only showing terminal process)

Bypass did not work.

No Active Directory.

Terminal was working fine 2 days ago, then this problem started. Seems several others have the same issue, but no remedy has been found.

Thanks for the ideas.

I found that, even if "Command (complete path):" is selected (instead of "Default login shell (/usr/bin/login)") the shell is not started directly by Terminal but started via login (as "login -pfq username /path/to/the/shell").

Start Activity Monitor.app, and select "All Processes" from the pop-up menu at the top of the window. Then click onece or twice on the "PID" (title of the left most column of the process list) so that the process list is sorted in the decreasing order of pid (largest pid at the top of the list).

Also start Console.app, and select "All Messages" (or system.log) in in the left pane of the window.

Now start Terminal.app (or open a new window in Terminal). In my case, Activity Monitor shows "login", "zsh" (=my shell) and "taskgated" are started in this order, and taskgated terminates in a 10 seconds or so. Console.app shows the message like

DATE TIME login[62364]: USER_PROCESS: 62364 ttys000

Do you get this kind of log message? Any other messages (errors) in Console.app?

If you think "login" is hanging, then, in Activity Monitor, select the process "login" in the process list, push the "Inspect" button at the top of the window, and push the "Sample" button; you may need to enter the admin password. Then you will see some info about what the "login" is doing now. Does this give any hit about what is going wrong?

Are you using any special settings or third party software which might interfere with the authentication process?

Thanks for the insight,

I found the solution with the combination of activity monitor and console. Upon opening terminal, several login processes started up. It seems it was stuck in password validation, and after clicking through, and entering the admin pass, all was fixed.


Thanks again.

Same problem here, what do you mean by "clicking through"?

Deleting com.apple.Terminal.plist fixed my problem