How do I clear old directories and commands in Terminal on MacBook Pro?

dislover wrote:

This is what worked.

250197654

Well, good.

But that sequence (including references to the bash login scripts) should not have worked for the reported errors from the zsh login scripts.

dislover wrote:

Is there a way just to return terminal to "factory settings"?

In Terminal's settings click the "Restore Settings"

If that doesn't work then delete Terminal's plist.

If they don't work then it might be that you didn't uninstall Homebrew correctly and it's left stuff behind . I can't help much there - google is probably best.

I erred in my first reply as that clears the history only for the current session. The history remains after you quit and relaunch Terminal.

The guidance I offered in my second post clears the history and works across sessions. The history remains unless/until you quit Terminal.

First of all: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/388622/zsh-zprofile-zshrc-zlogin-what-goes-where.

Notwithstanding that article, using ZSH on macOS doesn't automatically create or populate a .zprofile file, so you must have either had a .bash_profile at one point or created a .zprofile...

Something in .zprofile references /opt/homebrew/bin/brew and the fact you uninstalled Homebrew means that when the line in .zprofile is run on starting a login shell, the line fails for obvious reasons.

Something similar is happening with .zshrc - although since you redacted the command itself, I can't provide any further insights.

In any case, you need to go into the Terminal, and edit those two files - at lines 2 & 4 and lines 1 & 10 respectivley, to fix whatever is wrong with them. The built-in command line editors include vim, nano and pico.

BTW, the "cat" command simply copies the contents of the input somewhere (it's short for "concatenate") - usually from a file to the standard output in Terminal.

cat /User/<your profile name>/.zprofile

will dump the contents of .zprofile to your screen so you can read them and see what's wrong before trying to edit it with

vim /User/<your profile name>/.zprofile

I recommend glancing at some online help for vim (or whatever) before trying to use it, since some of the controls are not intuitive.

It's not terminal, it's your login shell profile. Yes you can "factory reset" that - you just delete .zprofile, .zshrc and .zshenv if they exist.

BUT - if you don't know what they are currently doing, then you don't know what else may break that is relying on whatever changes were set in those files. You should at least look over the contents (and post here if helpful).

Also, I hope your other comment about redacting your password was a mistake? Your password should never appear anywhere visible, such that it would need to be redacted...

Your zsh login scripts have old content. Either edit it and remove, or replace it.

Which of the scripts has old content varies by context.

In this particular case, .zprofile lines 2 and 4 are bad, and .zsrc lines 1 and 10 are bad. You can “#” comment those four lines as a test.

If you’re not familiar with a command-line editor, pico (recent) or nano (older) can be a good choice. The common commands are shown at the bottom of the pico (or nano) display, and command summaries are available.

Here are the zsh login script details: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/71258

In the zsh shell the command is history -p. On earlier Macs using the bash shell the command is history -c.

I also found this which works for me in Sequoia:

cat > .zsh_history (enter)

clear (enter)

(press control-d)

Then Quit the Terminal app and relaunch.