Restart terminal without closing on MacOS

Question

How to restart my current MacOS terminal session without closing the window?

In Linux I use exec bash but it does not work in this environment. I made a few changes to the .bash_profile (prompt, alias etc) I would like to see without closing it and opening again.

thanks in advance

Answer 1

Just type in the command:

exec bash -l 

I guess that should do it.

For zsh,

exec zsh -l 

This is needed because every shell on macOS by default is a login shell.

Justing writing exec bash would replace the current shell with a non-login shell which is not the same effect as closing and re-opening the terminal.

exec would make new bash -l process replace the current shell. If exec is not used, bash -l would spawn a new shell over the current shell incrementing the $SHLVL.

Answer 2

For me none of the other solutions work for ZSH.

Simply source ~/.zshrc did the job actually.

Note: running exec zsh -l outputs /Users/my_username/.zprofile:3: command not found: yarn (where my_username is my username). But running only the command mentioned above does the job.