MacOS – Help me reset the terminal after sudo command mistake

hangmacossudoterminalUtilities

I recently installed a cracked version of a program and it instructed me to block outgoing connections by following the instructions below.

Step 1

Click the "Go" menu, select "Utilities," and then double-click "Terminal" to launch the utility.

Step 2

Type "sudo cp /private/etc/hosts ~/Documents/hosts-backup" (omit the quotes here and throughout) to create a backup of the "hosts" file before editing. You can open this file later if you find the changes you made to your system resulted in unintended behaviors.

Step 3

Type "sudo nano /private/etc/hosts" in the Terminal window, and then press the "Enter" key. "Sudo" indicates that you want to gain administrator access, "nano" tells Terminal the program to use — in this case, the Nano text editor — and the pathname indicates the location of the "hosts" file.

Step 4

Type your administrator account password, and then press the "Enter" key. You must set up a password for your account to make changes in Terminal. If your account doesn't have a password, select "System Preferences" in the Dock, click "Users & Groups," select your administrator account, click the "Change Password…" button, and then enter a new password.

Step 5

Press the down arrow key to position the cursor below the default set of rules. Don't edit any of the existing rules as they set your current firewall settings and allow your computer to function properly.

Step 6

Type the domain IP address of the website you want to block communication with in a blank line followed by a space and the domain name. Use the format "0.0.0.0 domainname.com" and put each entry on a separate line.

Step 7

Close the window, enter the Terminal application again, and then type "dscacheutil -flushcache" to reset the cache and apply the new rules.

I only made it to step 3. I was asked to insert my password and since then my computer has been slower and the color wheel will not stop spinning when i open certain programs. I'm even having trouble force quitting programs and youtube videos refuse to load.

Is there any way that the Terminal can be reset or this problem can be rectified?

Best Answer

In step 2 you copied the original hosts file to a backup location at ~/Documents/hosts-backup (i.e. in your documents folder).

All you should need to do is rename that file to hosts and then copy it to /private/etc/hosts (overwriting the edited file) to undo any damage that you may have done.

However if you only got to Step 3 you may not even have edited the file yet - in which case a reboot should be sufficient.

Related Solutions

MacOS – Running a bunch of commands in Terminal

I went through the exact same process back when I was playing around with logKext. The unix command you may want to explore is /usr/bin/expect.

It can get complex quickly, but basically what it does is act as a mediator between you and the programs you're running so it can provide answers that you would normally have to type. As an example, I built this script so I could automate the process of printing the logKext output. You should recognize all of the commands you'd normally type to logkextClient yourself...

#!/usr/bin/expect -f
spawn logkextClient
expect "logKext Password:"
send "mylogkextpassword\r"
expect "logKextClient > "
send "print\r"
expect "logKextClient > "
send "quit\r"
close

Back in 10.5 and 10.6 this worked well for me for outputting the logKext print so I could pipe it into an email and send it. However, I was running this logged in as root to terminal, so it was simple.

Theoretically, if you weren't logged in as root, you could instead say

#!/usr/bin/expect -f
spawn sudo -k logkextClient
expect "Password:"
send “myrootpassword\r”
expect "logKext Password:"
send "mylogkextpassword\r"
expect "logKextClient > "
send "print\r"
expect "logKextClient > "
send "quit\r"
close

(note that I used sudo -k intentionally to be consistent and require a password every time)

So you could use your favorite command line editor to create this script, do a chmod +x to it and drag it to the dock for launching... Theoretically.

But I have been having problems in Mavericks getting /usr/bin/expect to behave properly with sudo, so this isn't working for me in other scripts like it should. And I don't have logKext installed at all anymore for testing anyway.

But I think this is the direction you may want to head.

Good luck!

Sudo giving dyld problem. Help for a beginner

On the short term, within a Terminal enter:

unset DYLD_FALLBACK_LIBRARY_PATH

and check that:

/usr/bin/sudo

is working.

Your description let think of an installer which modified your working environment in closed relationship with the X11 environment.

To further analyze where this problem is coming, within a Terminal search which initialisation file might be working on this environment variable:

grep DYLD ${HOME}/.profile ${HOME}/.bash_profile ${HOME}/.bashrc

If you are using anything else than sh or bash as your working shell, search inside the equivalent initialisation files.