MacOS – Terminal stuck at error won’t accept any commands.

command lineerroritermmacosterminal

I was trying to install CLI package from github but I messed up during the process and ended up getting this error. It is persistent and won't go away. Terminal wont accept any commands like mkdir, ls, clear screen. To fix this error I ended up deleting the info.plist file for the terminal ( I am not a very smart person) which somehow bricked terminal and it won't start anymore. I decided to download iTerm, and it still launches with the same old error. What am I supposed to do. Please help me .

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Best Answer

Well the error you're getting sounds like you've tried changing the $PATH variable somewhere. Possible candidates (not all of them need to exist) are

/etc/profile
/etc/bashrc
~/.bash_profile
~/.bash_login
~/.bashrc
~/.profile

Find all lines starting with export that contain the path you've posted above in those files and prefix them with a # to disable them. Restart iTerm and the error should be gone.

Regarding the deleted .plist, do you happen to have a TimeMachine (or other) backup that you might recover it from? Before re-installing everything you could also test creating a new user and copying the file from this account to yours.

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MacOS – Unknown error message in Terminal

.zshrc is a file run when you start an interactive zsh shell, found in your home directory. The error message says you have an export command which is written incorrectly on line 48. not valid in this context means you're trying to export something that's not a variable. It looks like you're trying to add stuff to your PATH, but are substituting the current path inside the zshrc file. Check that line in the file, there's probably a line along the lines of:

export $PATH=/some/directory/to/add/to/path/:$PATH

You just need to remove the first $ because it's substituting the current path there instead of assigning the PATH variable:

export PATH=/some/directory/to/add/to/path/:$PATH

See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22394367/zsh-error-export54-not-valid-in-this-context

How to get rid of stuck terminal error

Check your profile files (~/.profile, ~/.bash_profile, etc) to see what is being run when you launch your shell and remove references to zsh. To see exactly what is being executed when you launch your shell, execute your shell with the -x option. Also make sure your Terminal shell is set correctly in Preferences.

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