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I need to use my Terminal window on a MacBook Air but it closes about 10 seconds after I open it. Is there a setting or is it possible another program is causing it to close? If I type quickly I can run say diskutil but it closes after it runs.

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It sounds like terminal is crashing. Can you open console app and look for error messages which might be related to the problem? – dan8394 Aug 13 '11 at 6:36
Maybe your .profile or .bashrc is corrupted. Can you use a different account on your Mac, open Terminal.app from there and ssh to your account? – patrix♦ Aug 13 '11 at 8:26
Since you get a prompt, it's likely a resource limit is killing the newly launched processes. Have you confirmed this happens after a reboot? Also - a new user account would be a quick way to rule out any settings on your account. – bmike♦ Aug 13 '11 at 13:20
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Is Terminal quitting or is it still open when the window closes? If Terminal is gone, it sounds like it must be a crash, in which case there should be a crash log for it. If it's just the window that closes, it sounds like something is causing the shell to exit. By default Terminal won't close a window when the shell exits, but you may have customized the preference to do so. Make sure Terminal > Preferences > Settings > [profile] > Shell > When the shell exits is set to Don't close the window. That will help narrow down the cause of the problem. – Chris Page Aug 14 '11 at 0:08
Fire up Console and see if you find something about Terminal crashing. – Hai Vu Jul 20 '12 at 18:26

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