MacOS – Terminal not launching correctly, prompt does not appear until SIGINT

bashmacosterminal

I am running OSX 10.8.5 (Mountain Lion). When I launch terminal, or a new window/tab within terminal, I don't get my prompt. The last login information gets displayed fine, and my cursor is set (unblinking) below it. Also, the window title bar flashes between "bash" and "uname" for the "active process name" part, dunno what that's about as I've never seen it before. Also, the part that normally lists the current directory name just says "Terminal". I can ctrl+C to get to a prompt, but obviously that's not the expected behavior and it's getting pretty annoying.

I noticed it after I changed my hostname. It was appearing as ns-117-43 in my prompt; I changed it to local with scutil but setting it back didn't help. Haven't noticed anything else acting up.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Best Answer

It turns out I was wrong about what caused the problem. I had edited my ~/.profile in an attempt to fix the wrong hostname problem, in such a way that I was accidentally sourcing recursively. Hopes that knowledge helps someone else who makes the same mistake in the future.

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