Many thanks to everybody who responded.
On 18 Apr 2006, at 18:59, Bill Stephenson wrote:
Can anyone suggest where to look for such a file?
Look in the Terminal preferences to see if you have a script
entered to run when opening a window.
The "Open a saved .term file…" checkbox was unselected and no '.term'
files could be found anywhere either, so that didn't seem to be the
cause.
Similarly Boysenberry Payne wrote:
Have you tried looking in ~/.profile? Sorry if that's too obvious...
Nope -- there was nothing unusual in '.bash_profile', just some PATH
statements.
Brian McKee wrote:
Start Terminal.app and check under preferences (apple-,)
If you don't see it there, quit Terminal, backup and delete
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Terminal.plist
Betcha that gets it.
Yippee! That hit the nail right on the head.
In fact it is possible to mouse the 'com.apple.Terminal.plist out of
the folder onto the desktop temporarily just to see what happens.
MacOS then immediately rewrites a new '.plist'; Terminal opens
normally and seems to function normally. However it raises some
interesting questions.
Sherm Pendley wrote:
It's not a great idea to manipulate preference files directly.
Their location, filename, format, etc. are considered an
implementation detail that's subject to change without notice.
Apple has already made at least two changes, from old-style plists
to XML-based plists, and then from that to a binary file format.
Looking in the '.plist' file with BBEdit, it is indeed a binary file.
However "Property List Editor" shows its content to be a XML
dictionary. Clicking the little triangle next to 'Root' reveals the
'Property list'. In this particular case there was an 'Execution
String' with a 'value' which was exactly the spurious command line in
question. "Property List Editor" allowed that entry to be selected
and deleted. Having done that, and having put the file back into '~/
Library/Preferences', everything seemed to return to 'normal', or at
least, what it had been in the past.
Interestingly, the XML content of the newly written '.plist' and the
original '.plist' had not one single word in common -- they were
totally and radically different. But Terminal seems to behave pretty
much the same whichever '.plist' is installed in ~/Library/
Preferences. I guess the original '.plist' dates back to OS 10.2.?
and now it is OS 10.4.6 and, er, things have changed a bit…It
certainly bears out what Sherm says above.
Chris Devers added:
[/snip/
-- preferences and caches are generally easy & safe to rename or
remove when trying to diagnose software problems.
So, for the moment I have stayed with the original version of the
'.plist', edited with "Property List Editor" and all seems to be well.
Again thank you all very much for your prompt help and advice which
will no doubt prove very useful to many folk in a similar pickle.
Alan Fry
