Big Sur Terminal fails to present a shell

App & System Services Core OS
Bill Standen OP
Created Jun ’20
Replies 25
Boosts 0
Views 15k
Participants 22
Anyone encountering an issue with Big Sur and the terminal failing to present a shell some reasonably short time after boot?

Initially works no problems, after a while new Terminal windows open fine but the shell never loads and you're left looking at a cursor.
Answered by Bill Standen in 613593022
Found the trigger, it's an iTerm2 thing.

Disable Enable session restoration under Preferences > Advanced > Session, after that you shouldn't have a problem.

Raised an issue with iTerm's developers. Not sure if there's something here on the OS side as well.
Replies  25
Boosts  0
Views  15k
Participants  22
sync OP
Jun ’20
same issue here, even tried a reinstall from scratch and having issue once more
1
andrefgneves_ OP
Jun ’20
Same here. Also happens with iTerm2
1
Bill Standen OP
Jun ’20
Accepted Answer
Found the trigger, it's an iTerm2 thing.

Disable Enable session restoration under Preferences > Advanced > Session, after that you shouldn't have a problem.

Raised an issue with iTerm's developers. Not sure if there's something here on the OS side as well.
26
JJJ OP
Jun ’20
Rebooting appears to be the only way to get iTerm & Terminal to work again.
1
Security Engineer OP
Apple
Jun ’20

Raised an issue with iTerm's developers. Not sure if there's something here on the OS side as well.

Thank you for raising the issue (Issue #8965 on the iTerm2 Gitlab issue tracker for the curious) with the iTerm2 developers Bill! Feel free to also file a radar through the Feedback Assistant and link to the issue on the iTerm2 tracker in your request, this will get us some more info in case there is anything we need to do on our side.



2
xnutsive OP
Jun ’20
Thank you for posting this, had and reported the same issue ;)
0
ajh OP
Jun ’20
Note that whenever this occurs, you need to force shutdown the mac. Clicking the "Shutdown..." or "Restart..." menu items will hang the shutdown process on the desktop, after it quits all apps.
3
I.L.L.B.A. OP
Jun ’20
Exact same behavior as above @ajh above. Terminal becomes unresponsive, and cannot restart the system. I noticed once I got a popup to log in to an iCloud account.. might be related to a hanging sync service?
1
planetf1 OP
Jun ’20
Thanks for posting -- will try that

I too saw it with iTerm2.

I was using zsh (from homebrew). Switched to zsh (macOS) and same issue. Was about to switch back to bash to see if it occurs there, but will try this fix first.

When it occurs there's no way out except a reboot . A 'ps' never completes, sudo etc fails - it's pretty fatal. Presumably some kind of resource or ipc issue?


1
john-ft OP
Jun ’20
Thanks Bill. Disabling Enable session restoration appears to work for me.
1
bryan.m.obrien OP
Jun ’20
Thank you for posting. Same issue here. iTerm2 loads, but no shell prompt. Similarly, system will not shutdown - a forced shutdown is required, in my case.
0
Maxpain OP
Jun ’20
Same problem
0
gu3st OP
Jun ’20
Thank you so much for this. I even re-installed macOS and was about to downgrade back to 10.15. Thank you so much
0
Alessandro Martin OP
Jun ’20
The accepted solution is not working for me sadly...
0
NiekvdMaas OP
Jun ’20
Same issue here... the terminal (iTerm2, Terminal.app, any terminal really) hangs on the "login" command.
1
Big Sur Terminal fails to present a shell
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