+++ date = "2011-11-08" title = "Fixing a slow starting Terminal or iTerm2 on Mac OS X" tags = ["BASH", "shell", "MacOSX", "devops", "terminal", "terminal.app", "iterm", "iterm2", "zsh"] slug = "fixing-a-slow-starting-terminal-or-iterm2-on-mac-os-x" +++ For some time I have been annoyed with how slow my Terminal (in my case iTerm2) starts up. It would take 5-10 seconds before I was presented a prompt. Being in the console for the better part of the day, this was unacceptable. The first thing I did was _upgrade_ Bash to Zsh. I'd heard great things about Zsh, so I thought I'd give it a try. Zsh is really awesome, but it did not fix the start-up delay I was experiencing previously with Bash. Doing a little digging around I found a working solution. Apparently Apple keeps system logs in `/private/var/log/asl/*.asl`. Removing these files made my shell fast again.
Do not remove all files in /private/var/log/asl
as there are other files there that are not related to the shell. Leave them in there.