Malloc error after running chown -R on /usr/

Question

I'm running Yosemite on a macbook air.

I was following the suggestions after running brew doctor which told me that usr/local did not have write access. It told me to run chown on a bunch of directories in usr/. Not particularly knowing what I was doing, I chown -Red all of /usr/ and now I get this blaring error message whenever I open the terminal:

Last login: Wed May 20 08:59:06 on console
login(592,0x7fff7cacc300) malloc: *** error for object 0x7f9d0ac10c90: pointer being freed was not allocated
*** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug

[Process completed]

What in the world do I do now? Can I do anything?

Answer 1

Open Disk Utility by entering "Disk Utility" in spotlight and waiting for Disk Utility to appear, or by opening it through any other means.

In Disk Utility, select the OS partition on your internal drive¹ and click the Repair Disk Permissions button.

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Footnotes:

1. Typically called "Macintosh HD" and "Internal Drive", respectively.