Mac – Customise Mac Terminal command: Control+w

You could also run a "deadman's switch" app: have a script (maybe an Applescript) running when you start the Automator testing. After five minutes (or however long the Automator setup should take), it should display a dialog asking if you have control back this dialog would have a timeout (of 30 seconds or so), after which, it would try to kill the Automator process.

Example code:

delay 300

display dialog "Can you use the computer yet?" buttons {"Yes!", "No ?"} default button 1 giving up after 30

set retval to (the result)

set gaveUp to (gave up of retval)
set theText to (button returned of retval)

repeat while gaveUp or theText is not "Yes!"
    set randomNumber to (random number from 1 to 65535)
    do shell script "kill -9 " & randomNumber

    display dialog "Can you use the computer yet?" buttons {"Yes!", "No ?"} default button 1 giving up after 30

    set retval to (the result)

    set gaveUp to (gave up of retval)
    set theText to (button returned of retval)
end repeat

(Note that this code, instead of killing Automator, kills a random process. This is probably not a good idea, but I'm not sure exactly what you need to kill, and I thought it'd be fun. I've not actually tested that particular bit of code.)

This has to do with line breaks. Terminal is looking for either a space, or a continuos string of characters to make a line break. In this case the first opportunity it sees to break the line is between the y and the o. The "y" is shown because the last character in an extended line is shown in the last place to hint the user that something is happening there.

Workarounds...

You could try:

echo -e "a \tb \tc \td \te \tf \tg \tyo"

and everything will appear as you'd expect it.

also something like

echo -e "ab\tcd\tef\tgh\tij\tkl\tmn\tyo"

should break between the "k" and "l"

Still this is odd behavior and defiantly worth a bug/radar report