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I am unable to open the terminal or iTerm in my Mac OS, since my last update using brew. Not sure what I upgraded using brew :(

Below is the error message I get when I open terminal. Any help is much appreciated.

dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/local/opt/readline/lib/libreadline.6.dylib
  Referenced from: /usr/local/bin/bash
  Reason: image not found

[Process completed]

Thanks in advance!

karthiks
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  • When that happens, is the Terminal application still active, so you can access its preferences? Or does it terminate completely? – RealSkeptic Oct 25 '16 at 08:27

3 Answers3

26

The problem is two fold:

  1. Upgrade bash from brew, using "brew upgrade bash"
  2. The solution (aka step 1) requires Terminal to be opened, which doesn't.

So this is what I did. As it turns out the old bash version is incompatible with the newer upgrade of readline. So the deal is to hunt the location of readline in finder.

In my case, it is at /usr/local/Cellar/readline

Inside the above readline directory I found two directories: "6.3.8" and "7.0".

I renamed "7.0" to "7.0-old"

Created new directory "7.0" and copied contents of "6.3.8" in it.

Hurray! The Terminal now opens-up.

Now, run "brew upgrade bash" from terminal. And in the mean time, restore the readline directory to previous state like below:

  1. Delete "7.0" directory you created
  2. Rename "7.0-old" to "7.0"

You're now good to go. Cheers!

karthiks
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  • This is an excellent interim solution for when `brew doctor ..` `brew upgrade`, `bash ...`, etc don't even work at all because of the readline issue. (in my case caused by an `rvm` command :/ ) – hmedia1 Dec 18 '16 at 06:54
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    As @Max noted in another answer, pressing `Command` + `Shift` + `G` in a Finder window will allow you to copy/paste the directory path. – user2761030 Feb 07 '17 at 21:59
  • Thanks for posting this. Saved me a lot of time. For what it's worth, my issue was caused by `brew install graphviz` – Phil Taprogge Feb 10 '17 at 10:35
  • Thanks for posting this solution to a thorny problem! – jafelds May 17 '17 at 17:00
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I found that the above solution did not work in my case. Here is what did work:

  1. Open the default Terminal app, then click on Preferences
  2. change "Shells open with" to /bin/bash
  3. quit terminal
  4. open terminal again, you should be back to a prompt now
  5. Now, run brew upgrade bash from terminal
Chad Dienhart
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  • Thank you so much! this worked for me on osx 10.10.5. do you know if you change the location of `Shell open with` back to normal? – James N Jun 30 '17 at 04:32
  • @JamesN No, I did not change the `Shell open with` back. – Chad Dienhart Jul 06 '17 at 19:00
  • This worked for me, and I also kept the path to /bin/bash, ran brew upgrade bash, and everything appears to be working as it was prior to getting fubared. – Brian Litzinger Aug 15 '17 at 01:10
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    This worked for me, as well. You should mention that users can then`brew upgrade bash` or -- in my case -- `brew reinstall bash` (already at latest version, so `upgrade` does nothing) and then set "Shells open with" to the newly upgraded/reinstalled bash. Thank you!! – seWilliam May 31 '21 at 19:07
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Don't forget that you may also need to update your Terminal preferences if you've specified a custom shell path there (which I had totally forgotten about):enter image description here

clint
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