I just upgraded my Mac operating system to 10.15.1 (Catalina), and I'm now unable to interact with my terminal properly. When I open the Terminal application (or iTerm), it outputs the last attempted login time but does not then give me a prompt to enter commands.
I can see via Activity Monitor that the Terminal application is running a number of bash processes in the background that are possibly throwing errors, however I'm not sure how to decipher them. Here's a sample of what one such process is writing to /dev/stdout
:
Sort by top of stack, same collapsed (when >= 5):
__fork (in libsystem_kernel.dylib) 1314
read (in libsystem_kernel.dylib) 909
stat$INODE64 (in libsystem_kernel.dylib) 50
szone_force_unlock (in libsystem_malloc.dylib) 35
__ioctl (in libsystem_kernel.dylib) 34
tiny_malloc_from_free_list (in libsystem_malloc.dylib) 33
_objc_atfork_parent (in libobjc.A.dylib) 23
tiny_free_list_add_ptr (in libsystem_malloc.dylib) 23
_sigtramp (in libsystem_platform.dylib) 22
__open (in libsystem_kernel.dylib) 15
_platform_memmove$VARIANT$Haswell (in libsystem_platform.dylib) 12
_malloc_fork_parent (in libsystem_malloc.dylib) 9
sigprocmask (in libsystem_kernel.dylib) 9
__pipe (in libsystem_kernel.dylib) 7
__wait4 (in libsystem_kernel.dylib) 7
mach_msg_trap (in libsystem_kernel.dylib) 7
??? (in bash) load address 0x10cac2000 + 0x28ae1 [0x10caeaae1] 6
close (in libsystem_kernel.dylib) 6
tiny_free_no_lock (in libsystem_malloc.dylib) 6
tiny_malloc_should_clear (in libsystem_malloc.dylib) 6
fork (in libsystem_c.dylib) 5
setpgid (in libsystem_kernel.dylib) 5
Binary Images:
0x10cac2000 - 0x10cb42ff7 +bash (118.40.2) <30A60B27-69AE-323A-AA7E-B8B648C54096> /bin/bash
0x10d8e2000 - 0x10d972b5f dyld (733.6) <DAFEA246-2F9A-3DCB-A37C-4246D4F92770> /usr/lib/dyld
0x7fff61168000 - 0x7fff61169ff3 libSystem.B.dylib (1281) <1DD1BCD2-2C85-3B81-8CAF-224FB042F441> /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib
0x7fff61446000 - 0x7fff61499fff libc++.1.dylib (800.7) <1D42387D-206A-3F06-9B5F-705B83EAC295> /usr/lib/libc++.1.dylib
0x7fff6149a000 - 0x7fff614aefff libc++abi.dylib (800.7) <D89ABFBF-3754-35AB-BAEE-FBF14857F79B> /usr/lib/libc++abi.dylib
0x7fff62939000 - 0x7fff62968ff7 libncurses.5.4.dylib (57) <7115BD9E-9A53-3538-BA7C-6D71E8C0F9F1> /usr/lib/libncurses.5.4.dylib
...
This problem is occurring when I have my Terminal preferences set to open shell with "Default login shell", which worked fine on my previous OS version, and with the startup command /bin/bash
. Interestingly, I'm able to start up my terminal successfully when I change the shell startup command to /bin/sh
, however I'm then unable to source my bash_profile
in sessions started that way (when I type source ~/.bash_profile
, the process hangs).
I tried renaming the file com.apple.Terminal.plist
to com.apple.Terminal.OLD.plist
, as per the suggestion here (that wasn't exactly my problem, but I was desperate, and it didn't work in any case).
I'm stuck—help much appreciated!
set -x; source ~/.bash_profile
. This will make it print the commands (or their equivalent) as it executes them, so you can get some idea where it's getting stuck.