Shell corruption

[Chris_Burdess]

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

Very often, the shell becomes corrupted. The terminal window displays:
–: eval: line 1: unexpected EOF while looking for matching `)’
–: eval: line 2: syntax error: unexpected end of file
–: dump_bash_state: command not found

and no shell commands can be executed. The only workaround is to close the Cursor application completely and restart. Sometimes this fixes the problem for a while, sometimes not. It always seems to come back eventually.

Running on Mac OS Tahoe 26.2 with a bash shell.

Steps to Reproduce

Just use Cursor for a while with prompts that make it use the shell.

Expected Behavior

Should execute commands in the shell correctly.

Screenshots / Screen Recordings

Operating System

MacOS

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 2.3.35
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: cf8353edc265f5e46b798bfb276861d0bf3bf120
Date: 2026-01-13T07:39:18.564Z
Electron: 37.7.0
Chromium: 138.0.7204.251
Node.js: 22.20.0
V8: 13.8.258.32-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 25.2.0

For AI issues: which model did you use?

Happens with all models

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

[deanrie]

Hey, thanks for the report. This is a known issue and the team is already working on a fix.

The same error is being discussed in this thread: --: eval: line 1: unexpected EOF while looking for matching `)' --: eval: line 2: syntax error: unexpected end of file --: dump_bash_state: command not found. A few users shared details there. Main point: it doesn’t show up right away, it develops after using the agent for a long time.

For now, the only workaround is to restart Cursor when the terminal breaks. Some users tried cleaning up .bash_profile, but the issue still comes back after some time.

If you want to help with debugging, could you share:

• Your bash version: echo $SHELL and $SHELL --version
• Output of echo $PATH
• Whether you have any customizations in .bashrc or .bash_profile

All the info is in the thread above, it’s already being discussed with other users there.