MacOS Big Sur Terminal hangs and no prompt appear

beta-seed-programbig surhangitermterminal

I have a strange issue on my MacBook Pro (Mid-2017 15" with touch bar; MacBookPro14,3; 11.0 Beta (20A4299v)).

I've just installed macOS Big Sur on an external drive and everything was alright for some time. Terminal app was working perfectly and I still has one window open with it working OK.

The last step I remember doing was downloading and installing iTerm and adding it to the Full Disk Access on Privacy Control Panel before executing it.

After this, every time I open any terminal prompt, with the default app or iTerm, zsh, bash, etc., does not appear, and the window shows login "Terminal – login" and it does not show prompt.

NOTE: I know it refers to a beta OS but this problem has already appeared on other macOS versions. I tried the steps on both of these links but none solved it:

Any ideas?

Best Answer

Typically this is a dot file causing the shell to hang.

  1. Make a new account and log out of the old one - log in to the new and open the shell. If it hangs, too - you have system level configuration files to blame in most cases. Reinstall the OS if you can’t Seuss that out.
  2. If that works fine, then su - hanguser to confirm it’s that one account.
  3. You can run the shell without the rc dot files as well.

Also, before you try anything shut down the OS and validate it happens after a restart, basically try to avoid needing to go through this laundry list of potential issues:

Related Question