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Monday, October 5, 2009

Mac Terminal Error : Could not determine audit condition

When I launched my terminal today, was welcomed with this error :-

login: PAM Error (line 396): System error
login: Could not determine audit condition

[Process completed]

It is most probably because I was playing with my /usr/bin permissions the other day.
The fix is easy. Just delete the "/usr/bin/login" dir.

But how do I delete it, if I can't access the "Terminal" altogether ?
Come on - You can access any folder using the "Finder".

1. Open "Finder"
2. Open "Go To Folder"
3. Type "/usr/bin/login"
4. Delete it.

You are done.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

great ! worked !

newtriks said...

Thanks for this, I also need to repair permissions: Disk Utility > Repair Disk Permissions

MarcV said...

There is no directory named /usr/bin/login but I wouldn't have been able to use Finder anyway because I forgot the password. But, as it turns out, the disk repair utility does have root capability even for an ordinary user and it did fix the problem.

The problem was simply permissions. In my case I had scp'd the /usr/bin files from my MacBook Air but did not use the -pr option. Moving them to /usr/bin seemed effective but that's when login stopped working. Subsequently using scp -pr did NOT fix the problem. I'm grateful to newtriks for the post.

Unknown said...

login folder was not there in /usr/bin. But Disk Repair-Repair Permissions worked wonders!! Thanks a ton! I was almost on the verge of getting my system formatted.

Thraba said...

THANK YOU SO MUCH!

Thraba said...

Thanks a lot!

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