Can't Open my Terminal

Open System Preferences > Accounts, authenticate and control-click your account. You should see a dropdown menu with "Advanced Options". It will present a list of available shells.

Another alternative is to download a free Terminal app and use it to change your shell to what you want (bash, I assume).

This may not fix your permissions problem. If you're still having problems write back.

Select one of them. Close system preferences. Reboot.

Just as a control experiment, can you launch terminal from another account?

If you already have a valid shell, then maybe /etc/shells is corrupt? It should read

# List of acceptable shells for chpass(1).
# Ftpd will not allow users to connect who are not using
# one of these shells.


/bin/bash
/bin/csh
/bin/ksh
/bin/sh
/bin/tcsh
/bin/zsh

If that is good, then perhaps the Terminal preferences are corrupt, try deleting

Your Home Folder -> Library -> Preferences -> com.apple.Terminal.plist

Try downloading a experimenting with iTerm.sf.net (an alternate terminal emulator).

You need to replace it. You can get it from a backup. You can maybe get it from an install disk. You use the information I gave you above.

But without a correct /etc/shells you will not be able to start a shell in a terminal session.

And here are the ownership and permissions from my system

-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 179 Oct 5 2009 /etc/shells

Christian Larsen wrote:

And here are the ownership and permissions from my system

-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 179 Oct 5 2009 /etc/shells

I'm not quite sure what I could do with that information.

If the /etc/shells file does not have proper ownership and proper permissions, it will be ignored. So I gave you that information because you will need to make sure the file you provide has ownership and permissions like above.

Also, I just found a file called shells~orig, which has the same contents as you posted above for a typical shells file. Does that mean anything?

It means something renamed the /etc/shells to /etc/shells~orig and then did not put in place a working /etc/shells. I do not know what did this.

All I can tell you is if you want a working Terminal session, you MUST HAVE a valid /etc/shells file that lists at least the shell you want to use when you start a terminal session, and ideally it should list all the shells I have posted above, and is currently in your /etc/shells~orig

You can rename /etc/shells~orig to /etc/shells and that should do it.

Finder -> Go -> Go to Folder -> /etc

Use finder to rename shells~orig to shells

You will most likely be told you need to use administrative privileges.

Again, if you have a backup, such as Time Machine, Carbon Copy Cloner, SuperDuper, etc..., you could try restoring from your backup.

Bottom line. If you want to use a Terminal session, you must have a valid /etc/shells and it should look like what I have posted above or what is in your /etc/shells~orig. Without that you cannot use the Terminal.

On one of my older systems I have a few ~previous and ~orig files, but I also have the same named files without the ~orig or ~previous. So I would say this is a standard way to modify a /etc/ configuration file saving the previous value.

If you have the same file name without the suffix, then I would say you are fine. It is only in situations where you either do not have the file without the suffix and/or the file is empty that you have to worry.

Just reboot