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43 <STRONG><A HREF="tset.1.html">tset(1)</A></STRONG> <STRONG><A HREF="tset.1.html">tset(1)</A></STRONG>
50 <STRONG>tset</STRONG>, <STRONG>reset</STRONG> - terminal initialization
54 <H2>SYNOPSIS</H2><PRE>
55 <STRONG>tset</STRONG> [<STRONG>-IQVcqrsw</STRONG>] [<STRONG>-</STRONG>] [<STRONG>-e</STRONG> <EM>ch</EM>] [<STRONG>-i</STRONG> <EM>ch</EM>] [<STRONG>-k</STRONG> <EM>ch</EM>] [<STRONG>-m</STRONG> <EM>mapping</EM>]
57 <STRONG>reset</STRONG> [<STRONG>-IQVcqrsw</STRONG>] [<STRONG>-</STRONG>] [<STRONG>-e</STRONG> <EM>ch</EM>] [<STRONG>-i</STRONG> <EM>ch</EM>] [<STRONG>-k</STRONG> <EM>ch</EM>] [<STRONG>-m</STRONG> <EM>mapping</EM>]
62 <H2>DESCRIPTION</H2><PRE>
63 <STRONG>Tset</STRONG> initializes terminals. <STRONG>Tset</STRONG> first determines the
64 type of terminal that you are using. This determination
65 is done as follows, using the first terminal type found.
67 1. The <STRONG>terminal</STRONG> argument specified on the command line.
69 2. The value of the <STRONG>TERM</STRONG> environmental variable.
71 3. (BSD systems only.) The terminal type associated with
72 the standard error output device in the <EM>/etc/ttys</EM> file.
73 (On Linux and System-V-like UNIXes, <EM>getty</EM> does this job by
74 setting <STRONG>TERM</STRONG> according to the type passed to it by
75 <EM>/etc/inittab</EM>.)
77 4. The default terminal type, ``unknown''.
79 If the terminal type was not specified on the command-
80 line, the <STRONG>-m</STRONG> option mappings are then applied (see the
81 section <STRONG>TERMINAL</STRONG> <STRONG>TYPE</STRONG> <STRONG>MAPPING</STRONG> for more information).
82 Then, if the terminal type begins with a question mark
83 (``?''), the user is prompted for confirmation of the ter-
84 minal type. An empty response confirms the type, or,
85 another type can be entered to specify a new type. Once
86 the terminal type has been determined, the terminfo entry
87 for the terminal is retrieved. If no terminfo entry is
88 found for the type, the user is prompted for another ter-
91 Once the terminfo entry is retrieved, the window size,
92 backspace, interrupt and line kill characters (among many
93 other things) are set and the terminal and tab initializa-
94 tion strings are sent to the standard error output.
95 Finally, if the erase, interrupt and line kill characters
96 have changed, or are not set to their default values,
97 their values are displayed to the standard error output.
98 Use the <STRONG>-c</STRONG> or <STRONG>-w</STRONG> option to select only the window sizing
99 versus the other initialization. If neither option is
100 given, both are assumed.
102 When invoked as <STRONG>reset</STRONG>, <STRONG>tset</STRONG> sets cooked and echo modes,
103 turns off cbreak and raw modes, turns on newline transla-
104 tion and resets any unset special characters to their
105 default values before doing the terminal initialization
106 described above. This is useful after a program dies
107 leaving a terminal in an abnormal state. Note, you may
110 <STRONG><LF>reset<LF></STRONG>
112 (the line-feed character is normally control-J) to get the
113 terminal to work, as carriage-return may no longer work in
114 the abnormal state. Also, the terminal will often not
117 The options are as follows:
119 <STRONG>-c</STRONG> Set control characters and modes. <STRONG>-e</STRONG> Set the erase
120 character to <EM>ch</EM>.
122 <STRONG>-I</STRONG> Do not send the terminal or tab initialization
123 strings to the terminal.
125 <STRONG>-i</STRONG> Set the interrupt character to <EM>ch</EM>.
127 <STRONG>-k</STRONG> Set the line kill character to <EM>ch</EM>.
129 <STRONG>-m</STRONG> Specify a mapping from a port type to a terminal.
130 See the section <STRONG>TERMINAL</STRONG> <STRONG>TYPE</STRONG> <STRONG>MAPPING</STRONG> for more infor-
133 <STRONG>-Q</STRONG> Do not display any values for the erase, interrupt
134 and line kill characters. Normally <STRONG>tset</STRONG> displays the
135 values for control characters which differ from the
136 system's default values.
138 <STRONG>-q</STRONG> The terminal type is displayed to the standard out-
139 put, and the terminal is not initialized in any way.
140 The option `-' by itself is equivalent but archaic.
142 <STRONG>-r</STRONG> Print the terminal type to the standard error output.
144 <STRONG>-s</STRONG> Print the sequence of shell commands to initialize
145 the environment variable <STRONG>TERM</STRONG> to the standard output.
146 See the section <STRONG>SETTING</STRONG> <STRONG>THE</STRONG> <STRONG>ENVIRONMENT</STRONG> for details.
148 <STRONG>-V</STRONG> reports the version of ncurses which was used in this
151 <STRONG>-w</STRONG> Resize the window to match the size deduced via
152 <STRONG>setupterm</STRONG>. Normally this has no effect, unless
153 <STRONG>setupterm</STRONG> is not able to detect the window size.
155 The arguments for the <STRONG>-e</STRONG>, <STRONG>-i</STRONG>, and <STRONG>-k</STRONG> options may either be
156 entered as actual characters or by using the `hat' nota-
157 tion, i.e. control-h may be specified as ``^H'' or ``^h''.
161 <H2>SETTING THE ENVIRONMENT</H2><PRE>
162 It is often desirable to enter the terminal type and
163 information about the terminal's capabilities into the
164 shell's environment. This is done using the <STRONG>-s</STRONG> option.
166 When the <STRONG>-s</STRONG> option is specified, the commands to enter the
167 information into the shell's environment are written to
168 the standard output. If the <STRONG>SHELL</STRONG> environmental variable
169 ends in ``csh'', the commands are for <STRONG>csh</STRONG>, otherwise, they
170 are for <STRONG>sh</STRONG>. Note, the <STRONG>csh</STRONG> commands set and unset the
171 shell variable <STRONG>noglob</STRONG>, leaving it unset. The following
172 line in the <STRONG>.login</STRONG> or <STRONG>.profile</STRONG> files will initialize the
173 environment correctly:
175 eval `tset -s options ... `
179 <H2>TERMINAL TYPE MAPPING</H2><PRE>
180 When the terminal is not hardwired into the system (or the
181 current system information is incorrect) the terminal type
182 derived from the <EM>/etc/ttys</EM> file or the <STRONG>TERM</STRONG> environmental
183 variable is often something generic like <STRONG>network</STRONG>, <STRONG>dialup</STRONG>,
184 or <STRONG>unknown</STRONG>. When <STRONG>tset</STRONG> is used in a startup script it is
185 often desirable to provide information about the type of
186 terminal used on such ports.
188 The purpose of the <STRONG>-m</STRONG> option is to map from some set of
189 conditions to a terminal type, that is, to tell <STRONG>tset</STRONG> ``If
190 I'm on this port at a particular speed, guess that I'm on
191 that kind of terminal''.
193 The argument to the <STRONG>-m</STRONG> option consists of an optional port
194 type, an optional operator, an optional baud rate specifi-
195 cation, an optional colon (``:'') character and a terminal
196 type. The port type is a string (delimited by either the
197 operator or the colon character). The operator may be any
198 combination of ``>'', ``<'', ``@'', and ``!''; ``>'' means
199 greater than, ``<'' means less than, ``@'' means equal to
200 and ``!'' inverts the sense of the test. The baud rate is
201 specified as a number and is compared with the speed of
202 the standard error output (which should be the control
203 terminal). The terminal type is a string.
205 If the terminal type is not specified on the command line,
206 the <STRONG>-m</STRONG> mappings are applied to the terminal type. If the
207 port type and baud rate match the mapping, the terminal
208 type specified in the mapping replaces the current type.
209 If more than one mapping is specified, the first applica-
212 For example, consider the following mapping:
213 <STRONG>dialup>9600:vt100</STRONG>. The port type is dialup , the operator
214 is >, the baud rate specification is 9600, and the termi-
215 nal type is vt100. The result of this mapping is to spec-
216 ify that if the terminal type is <STRONG>dialup</STRONG>, and the baud rate
217 is greater than 9600 baud, a terminal type of <STRONG>vt100</STRONG> will
220 If no baud rate is specified, the terminal type will match
221 any baud rate. If no port type is specified, the terminal
222 type will match any port type. For example, <STRONG>-m</STRONG>
223 <STRONG>dialup:vt100</STRONG> <STRONG>-m</STRONG> <STRONG>:?xterm</STRONG> will cause any dialup port,
224 regardless of baud rate, to match the terminal type vt100,
225 and any non-dialup port type to match the terminal type
226 ?xterm. Note, because of the leading question mark, the
227 user will be queried on a default port as to whether they
228 are actually using an xterm terminal.
230 No whitespace characters are permitted in the <STRONG>-m</STRONG> option
231 argument. Also, to avoid problems with meta-characters,
232 it is suggested that the entire <STRONG>-m</STRONG> option argument be
233 placed within single quote characters, and that <STRONG>csh</STRONG> users
234 insert a backslash character (``\'') before any exclama-
239 <H2>HISTORY</H2><PRE>
240 The <STRONG>tset</STRONG> command appeared in BSD 3.0. The <STRONG>ncurses</STRONG> imple-
241 mentation was lightly adapted from the 4.4BSD sources for
242 a terminfo environment by Eric S. Raymond <esr@snark.thyr-
247 <H2>COMPATIBILITY</H2><PRE>
248 The <STRONG>tset</STRONG> utility has been provided for backward-compati-
249 bility with BSD environments (under most modern UNIXes,
250 <STRONG>/etc/inittab</STRONG> and <STRONG><A HREF="getty.1.html">getty(1)</A></STRONG> can set <STRONG>TERM</STRONG> appropriately for
251 each dial-up line; this obviates what was <STRONG>tset</STRONG>'s most
252 important use). This implementation behaves like 4.4BSD
253 tset, with a few exceptions specified here.
255 The <STRONG>-S</STRONG> option of BSD tset no longer works; it prints an
256 error message to stderr and dies. The <STRONG>-s</STRONG> option only sets
257 <STRONG>TERM</STRONG>, not <STRONG>TERMCAP</STRONG>. Both these changes are because the
258 <STRONG>TERMCAP</STRONG> variable is no longer supported under terminfo-
259 based <STRONG>ncurses</STRONG>, which makes <STRONG>tset</STRONG> <STRONG>-S</STRONG> useless (we made it die
260 noisily rather than silently induce lossage).
262 There was an undocumented 4.4BSD feature that invoking
263 tset via a link named `TSET` (or via any other name begin-
264 ning with an upper-case letter) set the terminal to use
265 upper-case only. This feature has been omitted.
267 The <STRONG>-A</STRONG>, <STRONG>-E</STRONG>, <STRONG>-h</STRONG>, <STRONG>-u</STRONG> and <STRONG>-v</STRONG> options were deleted from the
268 <STRONG>tset</STRONG> utility in 4.4BSD. None of them were documented in
269 4.3BSD and all are of limited utility at best. The <STRONG>-a</STRONG>,
270 <STRONG>-d</STRONG>, and <STRONG>-p</STRONG> options are similarly not documented or useful,
271 but were retained as they appear to be in widespread use.
272 It is strongly recommended that any usage of these three
273 options be changed to use the <STRONG>-m</STRONG> option instead. The -n
274 option remains, but has no effect. The <STRONG>-adnp</STRONG> options are
275 therefore omitted from the usage summary above.
277 It is still permissible to specify the <STRONG>-e</STRONG>, <STRONG>-i</STRONG>, and <STRONG>-k</STRONG>
278 options without arguments, although it is strongly recom-
279 mended that such usage be fixed to explicitly specify the
282 As of 4.4BSD, executing <STRONG>tset</STRONG> as <STRONG>reset</STRONG> no longer implies
283 the <STRONG>-Q</STRONG> option. Also, the interaction between the - option
284 and the <EM>terminal</EM> argument in some historic implementations
285 of <STRONG>tset</STRONG> has been removed.
289 <H2>ENVIRONMENT</H2><PRE>
290 The <STRONG>tset</STRONG> command uses these environment variables:
293 tells <STRONG>tset</STRONG> whether to initialize <STRONG>TERM</STRONG> using <STRONG>sh</STRONG> or <STRONG>csh</STRONG>
296 TERM Denotes your terminal type. Each terminal type is
297 distinct, though many are similar.
300 may denote the location of a termcap database. If it
301 is not an absolute pathname, e.g., begins with a `/',
302 <STRONG>tset</STRONG> removes the variable from the environment before
303 looking for the terminal description.
309 system port name to terminal type mapping database
313 terminal capability database
317 <H2>SEE ALSO</H2><PRE>
318 <STRONG><A HREF="csh.1.html">csh(1)</A></STRONG>, <STRONG><A HREF="sh.1.html">sh(1)</A></STRONG>, <STRONG><A HREF="stty.1.html">stty(1)</A></STRONG>, <STRONG><A HREF="curs_terminfo.3x.html">curs_terminfo(3x)</A></STRONG>, <STRONG><A HREF="tty.4.html">tty(4)</A></STRONG>, ter-
319 <STRONG><A HREF="minfo.5.html">minfo(5)</A></STRONG>, <STRONG><A HREF="ttys.5.html">ttys(5)</A></STRONG>, <STRONG><A HREF="environ.7.html">environ(7)</A></STRONG>
321 This describes <STRONG>ncurses</STRONG> version 5.6 (patch 20080621).
325 <STRONG><A HREF="tset.1.html">tset(1)</A></STRONG>
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