Using Terminal

[Madelin]

Trying to enter some commands found on http://www.macworld.com/article/1324...survival2.html into Terminal but to no avail.

I open terminal but after typing the commands correctly nothing happens, its like im writing in Textedit. On opening of terminal there is not text present. I imagine there is atleast meant to be a prompt for a command?

Any help appreciated, thankyou.

Using OS 10.5.2

[Satcomer]

Well did you type the command into Terminal on one line? Plus when you copy/paste the command in TextEdit make sure TextEdit is set to PLAIN Text first.

[ra3ndy]

What you SHOULD see when you open Terminal is a window where the title bar says something like Terminal -- Bash -- 80x24 and the window's content ends in a line of text similar to

your-computers-name:~ your username$

Making no assumptions, and meaning no insult, I just want to make sure you are talking about the program called Terminal that you found in your Applications/Utilities folder.

If you see nothing, like it seems you are saying, then I'd suggest resetting Terminal to default settings by quitting Terminal, then deleting the file called com.apple.Terminal.plist from YourHomeFolder/Library/Preferences and restarting Terminal. That SHOULD do it.

If not, search this forum for one of the many many tutorials on using a program called Pacifist to install individual programs (like Terminal) from the OS X Install DVD.

Good Luck!

[Madelin]

I tried trashing the preference file, did not fix the problem. I think i confused Satcomer a bit so im including a screenshot. The screenie shows terminal just after opening, i copies and pasted a command into it and pressed enter.

[Satcomer]

The way the article read you are open Terminal and type:

defaults write com.apple.dock mouse-over-hilte-stack -boolean YES

Then after hitting return type:

killall Dock


Now by you screen shot I don't see the correct prompt to type in. When you startup Terminal do you get a automatic message saying something like "Welcome to Darwin ....." and then get a prompt to type at like ra3ndy showed. So are you getting this prompt?

[Madelin]

No, its completely blank when i open it.
I have tried doing the whole command but was just showing the first line to show theres no prompt or anything.

[Mikuro]

Yeah, there's definitely something wrong there. You should see a command prompt about half a second after the window opens. Until the command prompt appears, you can't expect anything to work.

The first thing I can suggest is the typical troubleshooting routine: repair permissions, and try a different user account to see if the problem is system-wide or user-specific.

Also, in the Finder, select "Go To Folder" from the Go menu and enter "/bin". Make sure "bash" is present in that folder.

[Satcomer]

Strange! If you deleted the preference file launch Terminal again then go into it's Preferences and check them out for the Startup and Settings tab. Plus go into System Preferences->Sharing and give you Mac a name.

Plus run a maintenance program like Yasu or Onyx and run the maintenance tasks. Once you run the cleaning tasks let the Mac restart twice. This will build up the startup/shutdown cache.

Plus by ra3ndy's suggestion by deleting the preference file should have reset the Terminal preferences.