Why doesn't "exit" close a Terminal.app window on Mac OS X?
$ exit
logout
[Process completed]
Is there a way to close the window without using the mouse?
MacOS – How to close the Terminal in OSX from the command line
command lineexitmacosterminal
Related Solutions
Go to Terminal -> Preferences, then on the right hand side select "Shell", then select "Close if the shell exited cleanly" from the dropdown labeled "When the shell exits".
This will close the shell if it exited without a problem (such as when you typed "exit"), but if the process returns an error it will stick around so that you can see what it was.
The following Applescript will logout the current user:
tell application "System Events" to log out
You can wrap this up in a bash alias using the osascript command:
alias maclogout="osascript -e 'tell application \"System Events\" to log out'"
It is the same as clicking " > Log out [username]...", and will logout after a 2 minute wait
This is easily combined with the sleep command:
alias delayedlogout="sleep 3600; maclogout"
..or could be combined into a single alias:
alias delayedlogout="sleep 3600; osascript -e 'tell application \"System Events\" to log out'"
Best Answer
A window displayed by Terminal.app is just the frontend for the process you choose to run inside of it - in your case, a Unix shell. When you exit the shell, the Terminal.app does not close the window by default, so you have the possibility to inspect the output from whatever command you ran, after it finishes.
You can change your preferences here
to either
Besides that, you can (almost) always close windows in OSX with Cmd-W, so you don't need mouse even if it doesn't close automatically.
One more hint: I like hitting Ctrl-D instead of typing exit. Two keys vs. five.