Speed up OSX Terminal with one command

When you start up Ter­mi­nal, does it take over 10 sec­onds or so before the prompt appears?

Turns out the Terminal.app stores logs of pre­vi­ous ses­sions and over time this grows. Even apps like Main­Menu, that delete the "User Cache", do not delete these files.

These files are stored in an eso­teric loca­tion, hid­den from the reg­u­lar user. The files have the .asl file extension.

Here's the command.


sudo rm -f /private/var/log/asl/*.asl


Exe­cute that in a Ter­mi­nal win­dow. Then quit and restart Ter­mi­nal. No more delays or lags. Much faster Ter­mi­nal. The lack of logs to seek really speeds up Terminal.

This has been tried and tested in Snow Leop­ard, Leop­ard and OSX Lion. Won­der why Macs don't come with this already!