Terminal (shell) not responding

Reboot.

Does this happen with all commands, or just one? If one, what is it? If all, check the console log and the system log for error messages. Also, enable guest logins, log in as Guest, and test.

Mac OS X 10.6 Help: Creating a guest user account

If Terminal works in the guest account, then the problem lies in your home folder. Start by moving the file Library/Preferences/com.apple.Terminal.plist in your home folder to the Desktop, then quit and relaunch Terminal and try again. If it still doesn't work, quit Terminal again and replace the file (overwriting the new one that was just created.) From there it gets harder.

You must be looking in the wrong place. It's in the Library folder inside your home folder, not the other Library at the top level of the boot volume.

I noticed I have two instances of terminal.app.

You mean two copies? Where, and which one are you running?

This is going to be difficult to find without Terminal, but do you have any of the following files:

.bash_profile

.bash_login

.profile

.bashrc

You may be able to see them using your Guest account's Terminal session

ls -a /Users/yourShortName/

If you find any of the above files, you might try using something like TextWrangler (which can edit invisible files) and clean them up. By default you do not have any shell initialization files unless you either created them, or some Open Source package you installed created them.

Another thing you can try is downloading the iTerm terminal emulator, and see if that works

<http://iterm.sf.net>

If iTerm works, then this is related to Terminal and/or Terminal preferences and dependencies.

If iTerm does not work in the same way that Terminal does not work, then this is related to the Unix environment, which is generally related to the shell and the shell initialization files.

I am assuming that you use the bash shell (default shell on Mac OS X, unless you have been upgrading since Mac OS X 10.2 days, and then it might be tcsh). Do you know what shell you are using, as that does affect what shell initialization files are being used.

Then this has nothing to do with .plist (preference files) and everything to do with the Unix shell environment.

So you need to look for the above mentioned shell initialization files and see about cleaning them up or even deleting them if you do not really use them.

Invisible files can be edited with TextEdit. Press shift-command-period in the open-file dialog.