Why am I Unable to type into the terminal?

When you see Process Completed in the Terminal, that Shell session has exited, you cannot type anything further, and you would need to quit and relaunch the Terminal. If you did not enter the word exit, or type a control+d, either of which would end the current Terminal session, then you have an entry in one or more of your Shell dot files that is exit and killing your Shell. You would need to fix that.

If you do not have a programmer's editor installed already, then Install the free BBEdit text editor if you haven't already. It is a trial that when expired, becomes a free tool.

Quit the Terminal app. Launch a Finder Window and select your home directory on the Favorites listing. Type Shift+cmd+N to create a new folder and name it DOTFILES. Now, press shift+cmd+. to reveal the dimmed hidden files in your home directory. Your Shell's dotfiles will be there.

Bash

.profile

.bashrc

.bash_login

.bash_profile

.bash_logout

Zsh

.zlogin

.zprofile

.zshrc

.zshenv

For the respective Shell that you are running, locate and move (drag) the respective dotfile into the DOTFILES folder. Once in the DOTFILES folder, right-click on each dotfile and choose Open With BBEdit. Search in the newly opened file for the word exit. If you find one, place a comment character (#) before it. Then save the .dotfile, exit BBEdit, and then move that dotfile back into your home directory. Note, that any application run in a .dotfile that sends an exit command to the Shell will also kill the Shell to watch for those too.

When done, in the Finder window, click shift+cmd+. to undo the previous show hidden files command. Quit the Finder Window.

Now launch the Terminal application. It should not produce the Process Completed message.

How did you open the terminal exactly?

Did you enter a previous command?

Normally the terminal should show a gray box, not a blinking cursor when you open it, and you can type something.

Blinking cursor usually indicates it's doing something.

If you entered a command previously, then it may be working on that.

If it's asking you for your password, then it won't show anything but the blinking cursor. You type the password blind and hit enter to confirm.

It tried to log in to something, and it's showing something it did previously and completed, but did not return to the prompt.

How are you opening the terminal exactly?

Are you clicking on some icon somewhere?

Try going to the "Shell" menu at the very top and selecting New Window and see if that opens a functional terminal window.

Morgan Britt wrote:

I did not open a previous command.. It is a gray box cursor (my bad). It isn't asking for anything. In fact, I can't type anything into the Terminal.

it says [login: login: Could not determine audit condition]

and on the next line [process completed]

What is that about?

That can be something that was installed, and that is now malfunctioning.

Or more likely, it's an odd issue with a login file that hit some macOS installs back then.

See this reply for a sequence renaming the problematic /usr/bin/login file using Finder, then launching Terminal, reverting the name using Finder, and then fixing the permissions with a sudo chmod and sudo chown command.

Yeah, that's a script that's running and not returning control to the prompt.

See MrHoffman's link for how to resolve it. It's not going to be simple.

click here ➜ https://stackoverflow.com/a/53783211