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8 <B>tset</B>, <B>reset</B> - terminal initialization
12 <H2>SYNOPSIS</H2><PRE>
13 tset [-IQVqrs] [-] [-e <I>ch</I>] [-i <I>ch</I>] [-k <I>ch</I>] [-m <I>mapping</I>]
15 reset [-IQVqrs] [-] [-e <I>ch</I>] [-i <I>ch</I>] [-k <I>ch</I>] [-m <I>mapping</I>]
20 <H2>DESCRIPTION</H2><PRE>
21 <B>Tset</B> initializes terminals. <B>Tset</B> first determines the
22 type of terminal that you are using. This determination
23 is done as follows, using the first terminal type found.
25 1. The <B>terminal</B> argument specified on the command line.
27 2. The value of the <B>TERM</B> environmental variable.
29 3. (BSD systems only.) The terminal type associated with
30 the standard error output device in the <I>/etc/ttys</I> file.
31 (On Linux and System-V-like UNIXes, <I>getty</I> does this job by
32 setting <B>TERM</B> according to the type passed to it by
35 4. The default terminal type, ``unknown''.
37 If the terminal type was not specified on the command-
38 line, the -m option mappings are then applied (see below
39 for more information). Then, if the terminal type begins
40 with a question mark (``?''), the user is prompted for
41 confirmation of the terminal type. An empty response con-
42 firms the type, or, another type can be entered to specify
43 a new type. Once the terminal type has been determined,
44 the terminfo entry for the terminal is retrieved. If no
45 terminfo entry is found for the type, the user is prompted
46 for another terminal type.
48 Once the terminfo entry is retrieved, the window size,
49 backspace, interrupt and line kill characters (among many
50 other things) are set and the terminal and tab initializa-
51 tion strings are sent to the standard error output.
52 Finally, if the erase, interrupt and line kill characters
53 have changed, or are not set to their default values,
54 their values are displayed to the standard error output.
56 When invoked as <B>reset</B>, <B>tset</B> sets cooked and echo modes,
57 turns off cbreak and raw modes, turns on newline transla-
58 tion and resets any unset special characters to their
59 default values before doing the terminal initialization
60 described above. This is useful after a program dies
61 leaving a terminal in an abnormal state. Note, you may
64 <B><LF>reset<LF></B>
66 (the line-feed character is normally control-J) to get the
67 terminal to work, as carriage-return may no longer work in
68 the abnormal state. Also, the terminal will often not
71 The options are as follows:
73 -q The terminal type is displayed to the standard out-
74 put, and the terminal is not initialized in any way.
75 The option `-' by itself is equivalent but archaic.
77 -e Set the erase character to <I>ch</I>.
79 -I Do not send the terminal or tab initialization
80 strings to the terminal.
82 -Q Don't display any values for the erase, interrupt and
85 <B>-V</B> reports the version of ncurses which was used in this
88 -i Set the interrupt character to <I>ch</I>.
90 -k Set the line kill character to <I>ch</I>.
92 -m Specify a mapping from a port type to a terminal.
93 See below for more information.
95 -r Print the terminal type to the standard error output.
97 -s Print the sequence of shell commands to initialize
98 the environment variable <B>TERM</B> to the standard output.
99 See the section below on setting the environment for
102 The arguments for the -e, -i, and -k options may either be
103 entered as actual characters or by using the `hat' nota-
104 tion, i.e. control-h may be specified as ``^H'' or ``^h''.
108 <H2>SETTING THE ENVIRONMENT</H2><PRE>
109 It is often desirable to enter the terminal type and
110 information about the terminal's capabilities into the
111 shell's environment. This is done using the -s option.
113 When the -s option is specified, the commands to enter the
114 information into the shell's environment are written to
115 the standard output. If the <B>SHELL</B> environmental variable
116 ends in ``csh'', the commands are for <B>csh</B>, otherwise, they
117 are for <B>sh</B>. Note, the <B>csh</B> commands set and unset the
118 shell variable <B>noglob</B>, leaving it unset. The following
119 line in the <B>.login</B> or <B>.profile</B> files will initialize the
120 environment correctly:
122 eval `tset -s options ... `
127 <H2>TERMINAL TYPE MAPPING</H2><PRE>
128 When the terminal is not hardwired into the system (or the
129 current system information is incorrect) the terminal type
130 derived from the <I>/etc/ttys</I> file or the <B>TERM</B> environmental
131 variable is often something generic like <B>network</B>, <B>dialup</B>,
132 or <B>unknown</B>. When <B>tset</B> is used in a startup script it is
133 often desirable to provide information about the type of
134 terminal used on such ports.
136 The purpose of the -m option is to map from some set of
137 conditions to a terminal type, that is, to tell <B>tset</B> ``If
138 I'm on this port at a particular speed, guess that I'm on
139 that kind of terminal''.
141 The argument to the -m option consists of an optional port
142 type, an optional operator, an optional baud rate specifi-
143 cation, an optional colon (``:'') character and a terminal
144 type. The port type is a string (delimited by either the
145 operator or the colon character). The operator may be any
146 combination of ``>'', ``<'', ``@'', and ``!''; ``>'' means
147 greater than, ``<'' means less than, ``@'' means equal to
148 and ``!'' inverts the sense of the test. The baud rate is
149 specified as a number and is compared with the speed of
150 the standard error output (which should be the control
151 terminal). The terminal type is a string.
153 If the terminal type is not specified on the command line,
154 the -m mappings are applied to the terminal type. If the
155 port type and baud rate match the mapping, the terminal
156 type specified in the mapping replaces the current type.
157 If more than one mapping is specified, the first applica-
160 For example, consider the following mapping:
161 <B>dialup>9600:vt100</B>. The port type is dialup , the operator
162 is >, the baud rate specification is 9600, and the termi-
163 nal type is vt100. The result of this mapping is to spec-
164 ify that if the terminal type is <B>dialup</B>, and the baud rate
165 is greater than 9600 baud, a terminal type of <B>vt100</B> will
168 If no baud rate is specified, the terminal type will match
169 any baud rate. If no port type is specified, the terminal
170 type will match any port type. For example, <B>-m</B>
171 <B>dialup:vt100</B> <B>-m</B> <B>:?xterm</B> will cause any dialup port,
172 regardless of baud rate, to match the terminal type vt100,
173 and any non-dialup port type to match the terminal type
174 ?xterm. Note, because of the leading question mark, the
175 user will be queried on a default port as to whether they
176 are actually using an xterm terminal.
178 No whitespace characters are permitted in the -m option
179 argument. Also, to avoid problems with meta-characters,
180 it is suggested that the entire -m option argument be
181 placed within single quote characters, and that <B>csh</B> users
182 insert a backslash character (``\'') before any exclama-
187 <H2>HISTORY</H2><PRE>
188 The <B>tset</B> command appeared in BSD 3.0. The <B>ncurses</B> imple-
189 mentation was lightly adapted from the 4.4BSD sources for
190 a terminfo environment by Eric S. Raymond <esr@snark.thyr-
195 <H2>COMPATIBILITY</H2><PRE>
196 The <B>tset</B> utility has been provided for backward-compati-
197 bility with BSD environments (under most modern UNIXes,
198 <B>/etc/inittab</B> and <B><A HREF="getty.1.html">getty(1)</A></B> can set <B>TERM</B> appropriately for
199 each dial-up line; this obviates what was <B>tset</B>'s most
200 important use). This implementation behaves like 4.4BSD
201 tset, with a few exceptions specified here.
203 The -S option of BSD tset no longer works; it prints an
204 error message to stderr and dies. The -s option only sets
205 <B>TERM</B>, not <B>TERMCAP</B>. Both these changes are because the
206 <B>TERMCAP</B> variable is no longer supported under terminfo-
207 based <B>ncurses</B>, which makes <B>tset</B> <B>-S</B> useless (we made it die
208 noisily rather than silently induce lossage).
210 There was an undocumented 4.4BSD feature that invoking
211 tset via a link named `TSET` (or via any other name begin-
212 ning with an upper-case letter) set the terminal to use
213 upper-case only. This feature has been omitted.
215 The -A, -E, -h, -u and -v options were deleted from the
216 <B>tset</B> utility in 4.4BSD. None of them were documented in
217 4.3BSD and all are of limited utility at best. The -a, -d,
218 and -p options are similarly not documented or useful, but
219 were retained as they appear to be in widespread use. It
220 is strongly recommended that any usage of these three
221 options be changed to use the -m option instead. The -n
222 option remains, but has no effect. The -adnp options are
223 therefore omitted from the usage summary above.
225 It is still permissible to specify the -e, -i, and -k
226 options without arguments, although it is strongly recom-
227 mended that such usage be fixed to explicitly specify the
230 As of 4.4BSD, executing <B>tset</B> as <B>reset</B> no longer implies
231 the -Q option. Also, the interaction between the - option
232 and the <I>terminal</I> argument in some historic implementations
233 of <B>tset</B> has been removed.
238 <H2>ENVIRONMENT</H2><PRE>
239 The <B>tset</B> command uses the <B>SHELL</B> and <B>TERM</B> environment vari-
246 system port name to terminal type mapping database
250 terminal capability database
254 <H2>SEE ALSO</H2><PRE>
255 <B><A HREF="csh.1.html">csh(1)</A></B>, <B><A HREF="sh.1.html">sh(1)</A></B>, <B><A HREF="stty.1.html">stty(1)</A></B>, <B><A HREF="tty.4.html">tty(4)</A></B>, <B><A HREF="termcap.5.html">termcap(5)</A></B>, <B><A HREF="ttys.5.html">ttys(5)</A></B>, envi-
256 <B><A HREF="ron.7.html">ron(7)</A></B>
299 Man(1) output converted with
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