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User profile for user: john henning
john henning Author
User level: Level 1
21 points

Terminal.app crashing: Can I disable callbacks?

Five times in the last 48 hours, Terminal.app "quit unexpectedly". The Terminal_datestamp.crash files show

EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV) KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x0000000000000000

with a call stack that always includes:

com.apple.Terminal 0x000000010530bc94 0x105295000 + 486548 com.apple.Foundation 0x00007fff972ac5df __NSFireTimer + 83 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x00007fff95837d74 __CFRUNLOOP_IS_CALLING_OUT_TO_A_TIMER_CALLBACK_FUNCTION__ + 20 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x00007fff958379ff __CFRunLoopDoTimer + 1071 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x00007fff9583755a __CFRunLoopDoTimers + 298 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x00007fff9582ef81 __CFRunLoopRun + 2065

User impact

I cannot use the system: must find solution, even if the cost is to wipe disk and install previous OS (El Capitan).

The primary question

(q1) Is there some new feature of Sierra that integrates Terminal with other apps that can be turned off, perhaps a setting to disable callbacks?

Secondary questions

  • (q2) Can I potentially run a copy of the Terminal.app from a previous version of Mac OS X? Prior to my new laptop (and Sierra) these crashes never happened.
  • (q3) What additional detail would be useful, and how can I collect it?

    I am familiar with Unix application development, but not for Mac OS X. I am happy to collect additional detail by turning on debug tools, traces, event collectors, etc. but would need pointers to get started. Xcode is available, but I would be a beginner with it.

System summary

  • New MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015).
    • Arrived 6 days ago.
    • (Yes, I intentionally bought a brand-new instance of the previous model.)
    • Surprisingly, it arrived with Sierra. It presently has 10.12.1
    • Xcode installed
    • GCC 6.2.0 available, built locally.
  • Previous history brought in by Migration Assistant
  • Not tried (yet, anyway)
    • I have briefly visited safe mode but have not stayed there. I do not know whether there would be crashes of Terminal.app if I spent all day in safe mode
    • I do not know whether there would be crashes if I created a fresh, different user account.
  • Tentative rule-outs:
    • Malware, adware, etc are reasonably unlikely given the usage pattern for this work system: firewalls in sw and hw, no visiting of dicey websites, primary application used all day long is vim.
    • However, if Terminal is now integrated with the world wide web then I suppose anything is possible.

MacBook Pro with Retina display, macOS Sierra (10.12.1)

Posted on Dec 8, 2016 7:06 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply
User profile for user: michaelweiser
michaelweiser
User level: Level 1
4 points

Posted on Feb 19, 2017 4:53 AM

Heya!


This problem's been bugging me as well and with the information from this thread I narrowed it down to the following:


Stuart's test case can be simplified to the following:

  1. Open vim an enter three lines of arbitrary text such as this:
    a
    a aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
    a
    - First and third line just have to be present - no idea why.
    - The second line needs to have a space as the second character and wrap exactly one character to the next line.
    User uploaded file
  2. Delete the first character of the second line by pressing x so that now the line starts with a space and the last character of the line moves to the last column of the terminal.
    User uploaded file
  3. Wait about a second and Terminal.app will crash.


This suggests that Terminal.app has for some reason problems with lines that start with a space and end on the last column of the terminal.


It also only seems to relate with redrawing of the screen because I was not able to reproduce it with echo commands from the command line and I have only ever seen it with full-screen terminal applications like vim and screen, running both locally and remotely.


I had a suspicion it was related to the alternate screen which both vim and screen use by default. I was able to rule that out by setting TERM=vt100 to disable use of the alternate screen and still being able to trigger the crash as described above.


The problem seems to have been introduced with Terminal.app 387 of the 10.12.1 update. I extracted version 377 from my recovery partition (also present in the original 10.12.0 installer) which copes fine with above test case.


The obvious difference between both versions when diff'ing output of the strings command on both executables it the additon of Touchbar functionality mostly relating to man page interaction. I was not able to find any knob to disable this functionality to further narrow down the cause.


Thanks everyone for their research, providing a simple and reproducible test case and the workaround of going back to version 377 for now,

Michael

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Terminal.app crashing: Can I disable callbacks?

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