1 <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
3 ****************************************************************************
4 * Copyright (c) 1998,2000 Free Software Foundation, Inc. *
6 * Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a *
7 * copy of this software and associated documentation files (the *
8 * "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including *
9 * without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, *
10 * distribute, distribute with modifications, sublicense, and/or sell *
11 * copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is *
12 * furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: *
14 * The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included *
15 * in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. *
17 * THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS *
18 * OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF *
19 * MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. *
20 * IN NO EVENT SHALL THE ABOVE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, *
21 * DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR *
22 * OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR *
23 * THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. *
25 * Except as contained in this notice, the name(s) of the above copyright *
26 * holders shall not be used in advertising or otherwise to promote the *
27 * sale, use or other dealings in this Software without prior written *
29 ****************************************************************************
30 * @Id: tset.1,v 1.12 2000/09/09 20:33:07 tom Exp @
35 <link rev=made href="mailto:bug-ncurses@gnu.org">
36 <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
42 <!-- Manpage converted by man2html 3.0.1 -->
46 <STRONG>tset</STRONG>, <STRONG>reset</STRONG> - terminal initialization
50 <H2>SYNOPSIS</H2><PRE>
51 tset [-IQVqrs] [-] [-e <EM>ch</EM>] [-i <EM>ch</EM>] [-k <EM>ch</EM>] [-m <EM>mapping</EM>]
53 reset [-IQVqrs] [-] [-e <EM>ch</EM>] [-i <EM>ch</EM>] [-k <EM>ch</EM>] [-m <EM>mapping</EM>]
58 <H2>DESCRIPTION</H2><PRE>
59 <STRONG>Tset</STRONG> initializes terminals. <STRONG>Tset</STRONG> first determines the
60 type of terminal that you are using. This determination
61 is done as follows, using the first terminal type found.
63 1. The <STRONG>terminal</STRONG> argument specified on the command line.
65 2. The value of the <STRONG>TERM</STRONG> environmental variable.
67 3. (BSD systems only.) The terminal type associated with
68 the standard error output device in the <EM>/etc/ttys</EM> file.
69 (On Linux and System-V-like UNIXes, <EM>getty</EM> does this job by
70 setting <STRONG>TERM</STRONG> according to the type passed to it by
71 <EM>/etc/inittab</EM>.)
73 4. The default terminal type, ``unknown''.
75 If the terminal type was not specified on the command-
76 line, the -m option mappings are then applied (see below
77 for more information). Then, if the terminal type begins
78 with a question mark (``?''), the user is prompted for
79 confirmation of the terminal type. An empty response con-
80 firms the type, or, another type can be entered to specify
81 a new type. Once the terminal type has been determined,
82 the terminfo entry for the terminal is retrieved. If no
83 terminfo entry is found for the type, the user is prompted
84 for another terminal type.
86 Once the terminfo entry is retrieved, the window size,
87 backspace, interrupt and line kill characters (among many
88 other things) are set and the terminal and tab initializa-
89 tion strings are sent to the standard error output.
90 Finally, if the erase, interrupt and line kill characters
91 have changed, or are not set to their default values,
92 their values are displayed to the standard error output.
94 When invoked as <STRONG>reset</STRONG>, <STRONG>tset</STRONG> sets cooked and echo modes,
95 turns off cbreak and raw modes, turns on newline transla-
96 tion and resets any unset special characters to their
97 default values before doing the terminal initialization
98 described above. This is useful after a program dies
99 leaving a terminal in an abnormal state. Note, you may
102 <STRONG><LF>reset<LF></STRONG>
104 (the line-feed character is normally control-J) to get the
105 terminal to work, as carriage-return may no longer work in
106 the abnormal state. Also, the terminal will often not
109 The options are as follows:
111 -q The terminal type is displayed to the standard out-
112 put, and the terminal is not initialized in any way.
113 The option `-' by itself is equivalent but archaic.
115 -e Set the erase character to <EM>ch</EM>.
117 -I Do not send the terminal or tab initialization
118 strings to the terminal.
120 -Q Don't display any values for the erase, interrupt and
121 line kill characters.
123 <STRONG>-V</STRONG> reports the version of ncurses which was used in this
126 -i Set the interrupt character to <EM>ch</EM>.
128 -k Set the line kill character to <EM>ch</EM>.
130 -m Specify a mapping from a port type to a terminal.
131 See below for more information.
133 -r Print the terminal type to the standard error output.
135 -s Print the sequence of shell commands to initialize
136 the environment variable <STRONG>TERM</STRONG> to the standard output.
137 See the section below on setting the environment for
140 The arguments for the -e, -i, and -k options may either be
141 entered as actual characters or by using the `hat' nota-
142 tion, i.e. control-h may be specified as ``^H'' or ``^h''.
146 <H2>SETTING THE ENVIRONMENT</H2><PRE>
147 It is often desirable to enter the terminal type and
148 information about the terminal's capabilities into the
149 shell's environment. This is done using the -s option.
151 When the -s option is specified, the commands to enter the
152 information into the shell's environment are written to
153 the standard output. If the <STRONG>SHELL</STRONG> environmental variable
154 ends in ``csh'', the commands are for <STRONG>csh</STRONG>, otherwise, they
155 are for <STRONG>sh</STRONG>. Note, the <STRONG>csh</STRONG> commands set and unset the
156 shell variable <STRONG>noglob</STRONG>, leaving it unset. The following
157 line in the <STRONG>.login</STRONG> or <STRONG>.profile</STRONG> files will initialize the
158 environment correctly:
160 eval `tset -s options ... `
165 <H2>TERMINAL TYPE MAPPING</H2><PRE>
166 When the terminal is not hardwired into the system (or the
167 current system information is incorrect) the terminal type
168 derived from the <EM>/etc/ttys</EM> file or the <STRONG>TERM</STRONG> environmental
169 variable is often something generic like <STRONG>network</STRONG>, <STRONG>dialup</STRONG>,
170 or <STRONG>unknown</STRONG>. When <STRONG>tset</STRONG> is used in a startup script it is
171 often desirable to provide information about the type of
172 terminal used on such ports.
174 The purpose of the -m option is to map from some set of
175 conditions to a terminal type, that is, to tell <STRONG>tset</STRONG> ``If
176 I'm on this port at a particular speed, guess that I'm on
177 that kind of terminal''.
179 The argument to the -m option consists of an optional port
180 type, an optional operator, an optional baud rate specifi-
181 cation, an optional colon (``:'') character and a terminal
182 type. The port type is a string (delimited by either the
183 operator or the colon character). The operator may be any
184 combination of ``>'', ``<'', ``@'', and ``!''; ``>'' means
185 greater than, ``<'' means less than, ``@'' means equal to
186 and ``!'' inverts the sense of the test. The baud rate is
187 specified as a number and is compared with the speed of
188 the standard error output (which should be the control
189 terminal). The terminal type is a string.
191 If the terminal type is not specified on the command line,
192 the -m mappings are applied to the terminal type. If the
193 port type and baud rate match the mapping, the terminal
194 type specified in the mapping replaces the current type.
195 If more than one mapping is specified, the first applica-
198 For example, consider the following mapping:
199 <STRONG>dialup>9600:vt100</STRONG>. The port type is dialup , the operator
200 is >, the baud rate specification is 9600, and the termi-
201 nal type is vt100. The result of this mapping is to spec-
202 ify that if the terminal type is <STRONG>dialup</STRONG>, and the baud rate
203 is greater than 9600 baud, a terminal type of <STRONG>vt100</STRONG> will
206 If no baud rate is specified, the terminal type will match
207 any baud rate. If no port type is specified, the terminal
208 type will match any port type. For example, <STRONG>-m</STRONG>
209 <STRONG>dialup:vt100</STRONG> <STRONG>-m</STRONG> <STRONG>:?xterm</STRONG> will cause any dialup port,
210 regardless of baud rate, to match the terminal type vt100,
211 and any non-dialup port type to match the terminal type
212 ?xterm. Note, because of the leading question mark, the
213 user will be queried on a default port as to whether they
214 are actually using an xterm terminal.
216 No whitespace characters are permitted in the -m option
217 argument. Also, to avoid problems with meta-characters,
218 it is suggested that the entire -m option argument be
219 placed within single quote characters, and that <STRONG>csh</STRONG> users
220 insert a backslash character (``\'') before any exclama-
225 <H2>HISTORY</H2><PRE>
226 The <STRONG>tset</STRONG> command appeared in BSD 3.0. The <STRONG>ncurses</STRONG> imple-
227 mentation was lightly adapted from the 4.4BSD sources for
228 a terminfo environment by Eric S. Raymond <esr@snark.thyr-
233 <H2>COMPATIBILITY</H2><PRE>
234 The <STRONG>tset</STRONG> utility has been provided for backward-compati-
235 bility with BSD environments (under most modern UNIXes,
236 <STRONG>/etc/inittab</STRONG> and <STRONG><A HREF="getty.1.html">getty(1)</A></STRONG> can set <STRONG>TERM</STRONG> appropriately for
237 each dial-up line; this obviates what was <STRONG>tset</STRONG>'s most
238 important use). This implementation behaves like 4.4BSD
239 tset, with a few exceptions specified here.
241 The -S option of BSD tset no longer works; it prints an
242 error message to stderr and dies. The -s option only sets
243 <STRONG>TERM</STRONG>, not <STRONG>TERMCAP</STRONG>. Both these changes are because the
244 <STRONG>TERMCAP</STRONG> variable is no longer supported under terminfo-
245 based <STRONG>ncurses</STRONG>, which makes <STRONG>tset</STRONG> <STRONG>-S</STRONG> useless (we made it die
246 noisily rather than silently induce lossage).
248 There was an undocumented 4.4BSD feature that invoking
249 tset via a link named `TSET` (or via any other name begin-
250 ning with an upper-case letter) set the terminal to use
251 upper-case only. This feature has been omitted.
253 The -A, -E, -h, -u and -v options were deleted from the
254 <STRONG>tset</STRONG> utility in 4.4BSD. None of them were documented in
255 4.3BSD and all are of limited utility at best. The -a, -d,
256 and -p options are similarly not documented or useful, but
257 were retained as they appear to be in widespread use. It
258 is strongly recommended that any usage of these three
259 options be changed to use the -m option instead. The -n
260 option remains, but has no effect. The -adnp options are
261 therefore omitted from the usage summary above.
263 It is still permissible to specify the -e, -i, and -k
264 options without arguments, although it is strongly recom-
265 mended that such usage be fixed to explicitly specify the
268 As of 4.4BSD, executing <STRONG>tset</STRONG> as <STRONG>reset</STRONG> no longer implies
269 the -Q option. Also, the interaction between the - option
270 and the <EM>terminal</EM> argument in some historic implementations
271 of <STRONG>tset</STRONG> has been removed.
276 <H2>ENVIRONMENT</H2><PRE>
277 The <STRONG>tset</STRONG> command uses the <STRONG>SHELL</STRONG> and <STRONG>TERM</STRONG> environment vari-
284 system port name to terminal type mapping database
288 terminal capability database
292 <H2>SEE ALSO</H2><PRE>
293 <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="tty.4.html">tty(4)</A></STRONG>, <STRONG><A HREF="termcap.5.html">termcap(5)</A></STRONG>, <STRONG><A HREF="ttys.5.html">ttys(5)</A></STRONG>, envi-
294 <STRONG><A HREF="ron.7.html">ron(7)</A></STRONG>
337 Man(1) output converted with
338 <a href="http://www.oac.uci.edu/indiv/ehood/man2html.html">man2html</a>