Terminal hangs at login occasionally

Question

Hi,
So this has now happened twice. When opening a new terminal window, or new tab, the terminal will just hang at the 'login' process. It will never actually present a prompt. Quitting terminal and restarting did no good. Also, perhaps related, I had to do a hard shutdown, as it hung during the restart process.

Answer 1

Have you made any recent changes to your shell's initialization scripts?
try cranking up the verbosity, typically by using something like: 'set -xv'
Which file to use depends on if you're using a login shell or not.
if login shell add it to one of these files:
~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login, or ~/.profile
if not a login shell add it to the ~/.bashrc file.
for example
$ head .profile
#!/bin/bash
set -xv
Then just start another Terminal.app session. Watch for where it hangs.