Ubuntu 18.04 terminal is not responding

Question

When I open gnome-terminal, I see no command prompt. Pressing any button does not help. What can I do to fix my terminal?

Not sure if that is still (pre)installed, but can you search for xterm in your applications as an alternative terminal emulator? If that one works and gives you a usable shell with command prompt, something is badly configured in gnome-terminal, if both don't respond it's likely something bad in your shell initialization scripts. You should probably also be able to run commands from Gnome when you press Alt+F2, can you try opening a different shell in those terminals, by typing gnome-terminal -e sh or xterm -e sh there respectively? Please report back with the results. — Byte Commander, Jan 21 '19 at 12:39
Run cp --backup /etc/skel/.bashrc ~/.bashrc and try again, this will reset your .bashrc file to the default one. — pLumo, Jan 21 '19 at 14:51
check your .bashrc and any included files for incorrect escaping (seems like something is stuck, for example, it could be an alias with incorrect quotes). It should be enough to rename your .bashrc to test whether it is the culprit. — eko, Mar 07 '19 at 15:12
The wallpaper reveals that it's Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver). — Artur Meinild, Sep 20 '21 at 11:26

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited Mar 13 '19 at 16:20

Under these circumnstances to be able to edit the .bashrc:

Go to the terminal and go to Edit/Preferences/Commands:

Tick these 2 :
- Run command as a login shell
- Run a custom command instead of my shell
  - Custom command: /bin/dash
Close and open a new tab in the terminal, you should have a $ and be able to run some basic commands
Now you can edit your .bashrc file (in your home directory), copy the content to .bashrc_bad and then preferably delete everything inside .bashrc
Save it and run bash to see if it crashes again

1 Answers1