Terminal not working on Mac Air

I have deleted my iMac data and tried to reinstall OS X El Capitan but it didn’t work so I tried to make a bootable drive with terminal and I went through the steps but still it did not work. I have a MacBook Air and tried to use terminal I put the flash drive in and entered the stuff to download OS X El Capitan but when I did it asked for the password and I entered it but it said command not found. On the top it said 80 times 24. Please I need help!

MacBook Air (2018 – 2020)

Posted on Jul 23, 2023 8:16 AM

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2 replies

Jul 23, 2023 12:32 PM in response to AppleMan345

RE: "On the top it said 80 times 24"


That's just the size of the window, in characters. In the old days, if you were using a terminal that could support a full-screen editor or game, you often needed to tell the computer how many lines and character it could display at one time. Especially if the answer was something other than "24 rows of 80 characters each." (If the computer's idea of the screen size was off, it might draw a garbled mess of characters on your terminal screen.)


If you resize the Terminal window, you'll see the numbers in the title bar change to reflect the new size.


So the "80 x 24" doesn't mean anything bad, but also does not tell us anything about why you ran into a problem.

Jul 23, 2023 12:52 PM in response to AppleMan345

AppleMan345 wrote:

Please I need help!


If you want help, we need to see an exact copy of the command line that you typed into Terminal, including any special escape sequences (or absence thereof). We also need to see the error message(s). (You can edit out your user name, and of course you should edit out any passwords.)


E.g.,


XXXXXX:~ YYYYYY$ ls this-file\ does-not-exist
ls: this-file does-not-exist: No such file or directory

XXXXXX:~ YYYYYY$ ls this-file does-not-exist
ls: does-not-exist: No such file or directory
ls: this-file: No such file or directory


Here I copied and pasted text from the Terminal window, and then edited it to obscure the parts of the prompt that reflect my name. Notice how on the command line, a space in the middle of a filename will be interpreted as being a separator between two filenames (unless you qualify it in some way like typing a leading \).


Terminal not working on Mac Air

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