Terminal freezes with beach ball on High Sierra

high sierraterminal

My terminal frequently freeze with a spinning beach ball of doom. I've tested using both iTerm2 and the default Terminal, and it happens with both. And it doesn't seem to matter what I'm doing. I've had it freeze while nothing is running in any terminal, as well as while running a myriad of different programs (npm, webpack, gulp etc.).

When the terminals freeze, I'm able to force quit the app, but unable to start it again. And if one freeze, it seems to affect the other (if iTerm2 freeze and I force quit the app, I'm still unable to open Terminal). In order to use a terminal again I'm forced to reboot the machine.

While rebooting (after a terminal freeze) the machine also always hangs after closing all apps. I'm still able to move the cursor around on a black background, but that's it. The machine hangs there until I short circuit by holding down the power button.

What I've tried

I've tried resetting NVRAM and SMC to no avail.

Best Answer

You are likely being hit by a macOS 10.13.2 kernel bug, described here, and exposed pretty regularly by htop, described here.

Supposedly, macOS 10.13.4 beta has a kernel fix, and version 2.10.0 of htop was released to work around this bug.

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Ls output does not have color while SSHing to another machine with iTerm2, but does with Terminal

ls output with colors (ls -G) is not the default option. Run the following command in your terminal to enable ls colors by default:

echo "alias ls='ls -G'" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

This and all future terminal sessions will now display colors correctly.

If you're still not seeing colors on your remote (or local) session follow these steps:

In iTerm verify that you're sending a terminal type that supports colors. Open the preferences window -> Profiles -> Default -> Terminal. I'd recommend putting xterm-256color as the Terminal Type.

Terminal Preferences

While connected to the remote machine, run ls -G and open the iTerm preferences again: preferences window -> profiles -> Default -> Colors. Adjust the ANSI Colors, and turn the minimum contrast down until the colors in the terminal window start to show color.

Terminal Colors

If the remote system supports ls --color=always, remove any existing aliases in ~/.profile or ~/.bashrc and update as follows:

echo "alias ls='ls --color=always'" >> ~/.bashrc

MacOS – How to kill a process that won’t die

killall kills by process name (which is definitively not 77439 and most probably also not Mathematica). You can use kill 77439 or (if this fails) kill -9 77439 instead (but if the process is really stuck, only a reboot will solve the problem).

Also, due the the way sending/processing of signals (like kill -9) works in Unix/OS X, there are situations where a process will be unkillable. One typical example for this is if a process gets stuck while accessing some external device and never actually gets control back. In such situations a reboot is the only way to get rid of the process.

Best Answer

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Ls output does not have color while SSHing to another machine with iTerm2, but does with Terminal

MacOS – How to kill a process that won’t die

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