PTY exhaustion from orphaned Terminal.app windows

[FrederikHandberg]

Summary

Mac Mini ran out of pseudo-terminal devices (511 max). All job execution blocked.

Root Cause

Terminal.app accumulated 618 orphaned windows from osascript do script calls (steer, SSH management). Each allocates a pty, never closes.

Impact

• All Jensen jobs fail: tmux new-session returned non-zero exit status 1
• OSError: out of pty devices
• Health score: 30

Fix Applied

osascript -e 'tell application "Terminal" to close every window' -- freed 470+ ptys.

Prevention Needed

1. env-hygiene.sh: count Terminal windows, close excess (max 5)
2. steer: close Terminal windows after use
3. Health monitoring: add who | wc -l -- alert if > 50
4. Morning report: include Terminal window count