The terminal adapter works by connecting to a remote system with telnet or SSH and running commands. If you are using the UNIX/Linux commands, we empirically run the scripts/commands using the shell, and it's easy to know when things complete. When you use the terminal commands, things run using expect operations which determine when the action completes. For example, we might watch for the prompt to appear. Essentially terminal interaction is screen scraping to determine when things are done, and the expect statements determine what we look for. You can have a whole series of actions in a dialog with the remote terminal, so you can send text, watch for something, send more text, etc.
In all likelihood, your expect is not matching a pattern at the end of the operation so we do not know it is complete.
If you are running against a UNIX/Linux system, consider using the UNIX/Linux activities.
Check the prompt on the target to see that it matches the prompt on the device.
Look at the "Execute Terminal Command Activity Timed Out" section of the Troubleshooting chapter in the Terminal adapter guide in the customer documentation. http://www.cisco.com/en/US/customer/docs/net_mgmt/datacenter_mgmt/process_auto/teo/v2_3/adapter/terminal/Terminal_AdapterGuide.html
