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30 * @Id: tset.1,v 1.27 2011/12/17 23:20:35 tom Exp @
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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 System-V-like UNIXes and systems using that conven-
74 tion, <EM>getty</EM> does this job by setting <STRONG>TERM</STRONG> according to the
75 type passed to it by <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.
121 <STRONG>-e</STRONG> Set the erase character to <EM>ch</EM>.
123 <STRONG>-I</STRONG> Do not send the terminal or tab initialization
124 strings to the terminal.
126 <STRONG>-i</STRONG> Set the interrupt character to <EM>ch</EM>.
128 <STRONG>-k</STRONG> Set the line kill character to <EM>ch</EM>.
130 <STRONG>-m</STRONG> Specify a mapping from a port type to a terminal.
131 See the section <STRONG>TERMINAL</STRONG> <STRONG>TYPE</STRONG> <STRONG>MAPPING</STRONG> for more infor-
134 <STRONG>-Q</STRONG> Do not display any values for the erase, interrupt
135 and line kill characters. Normally <STRONG>tset</STRONG> displays the
136 values for control characters which differ from the
137 system's default values.
139 <STRONG>-q</STRONG> The terminal type is displayed to the standard out-
140 put, and the terminal is not initialized in any way.
141 The option `-' by itself is equivalent but archaic.
143 <STRONG>-r</STRONG> Print the terminal type to the standard error output.
145 <STRONG>-s</STRONG> Print the sequence of shell commands to initialize
146 the environment variable <STRONG>TERM</STRONG> to the standard output.
147 See the section <STRONG>SETTING</STRONG> <STRONG>THE</STRONG> <STRONG>ENVIRONMENT</STRONG> for details.
149 <STRONG>-V</STRONG> reports the version of ncurses which was used in this
152 <STRONG>-w</STRONG> Resize the window to match the size deduced via
153 <STRONG>setupterm</STRONG>. Normally this has no effect, unless
154 <STRONG>setupterm</STRONG> is not able to detect the window size.
156 The arguments for the <STRONG>-e</STRONG>, <STRONG>-i</STRONG>, and <STRONG>-k</STRONG> options may either be
157 entered as actual characters or by using the `hat' nota-
158 tion, i.e., control-h may be specified as ``^H'' or
163 <H2>SETTING THE ENVIRONMENT</H2><PRE>
164 It is often desirable to enter the terminal type and
165 information about the terminal's capabilities into the
166 shell's environment. This is done using the <STRONG>-s</STRONG> option.
168 When the <STRONG>-s</STRONG> option is specified, the commands to enter the
169 information into the shell's environment are written to
170 the standard output. If the <STRONG>SHELL</STRONG> environmental variable
171 ends in ``csh'', the commands are for <STRONG>csh</STRONG>, otherwise, they
172 are for <STRONG>sh</STRONG>. Note, the <STRONG>csh</STRONG> commands set and unset the
173 shell variable <STRONG>noglob</STRONG>, leaving it unset. The following
174 line in the <STRONG>.login</STRONG> or <STRONG>.profile</STRONG> files will initialize the
175 environment correctly:
177 eval `tset -s options ... `
181 <H2>TERMINAL TYPE MAPPING</H2><PRE>
182 When the terminal is not hardwired into the system (or the
183 current system information is incorrect) the terminal type
184 derived from the <EM>/etc/ttys</EM> file or the <STRONG>TERM</STRONG> environmental
185 variable is often something generic like <STRONG>network</STRONG>, <STRONG>dialup</STRONG>,
186 or <STRONG>unknown</STRONG>. When <STRONG>tset</STRONG> is used in a startup script it is
187 often desirable to provide information about the type of
188 terminal used on such ports.
190 The purpose of the <STRONG>-m</STRONG> option is to map from some set of
191 conditions to a terminal type, that is, to tell <STRONG>tset</STRONG> ``If
192 I'm on this port at a particular speed, guess that I'm on
193 that kind of terminal''.
195 The argument to the <STRONG>-m</STRONG> option consists of an optional port
196 type, an optional operator, an optional baud rate specifi-
197 cation, an optional colon (``:'') character and a terminal
198 type. The port type is a string (delimited by either the
199 operator or the colon character). The operator may be any
200 combination of ``>'', ``<'', ``@'', and ``!''; ``>'' means
201 greater than, ``<'' means less than, ``@'' means equal to
202 and ``!'' inverts the sense of the test. The baud rate is
203 specified as a number and is compared with the speed of
204 the standard error output (which should be the control
205 terminal). The terminal type is a string.
207 If the terminal type is not specified on the command line,
208 the <STRONG>-m</STRONG> mappings are applied to the terminal type. If the
209 port type and baud rate match the mapping, the terminal
210 type specified in the mapping replaces the current type.
211 If more than one mapping is specified, the first applica-
214 For example, consider the following mapping:
215 <STRONG>dialup>9600:vt100</STRONG>. The port type is dialup , the operator
216 is >, the baud rate specification is 9600, and the termi-
217 nal type is vt100. The result of this mapping is to spec-
218 ify that if the terminal type is <STRONG>dialup</STRONG>, and the baud rate
219 is greater than 9600 baud, a terminal type of <STRONG>vt100</STRONG> will
222 If no baud rate is specified, the terminal type will match
223 any baud rate. If no port type is specified, the terminal
224 type will match any port type. For example, <STRONG>-m</STRONG>
225 <STRONG>dialup:vt100</STRONG> <STRONG>-m</STRONG> <STRONG>:?xterm</STRONG> will cause any dialup port,
226 regardless of baud rate, to match the terminal type vt100,
227 and any non-dialup port type to match the terminal type
228 ?xterm. Note, because of the leading question mark, the
229 user will be queried on a default port as to whether they
230 are actually using an xterm terminal.
232 No whitespace characters are permitted in the <STRONG>-m</STRONG> option
233 argument. Also, to avoid problems with meta-characters,
234 it is suggested that the entire <STRONG>-m</STRONG> option argument be
235 placed within single quote characters, and that <STRONG>csh</STRONG> users
236 insert a backslash character (``\'') before any exclama-
241 <H2>HISTORY</H2><PRE>
242 The <STRONG>tset</STRONG> command appeared in BSD 3.0. The <STRONG>ncurses</STRONG> imple-
243 mentation was lightly adapted from the 4.4BSD sources for
244 a terminfo environment by Eric S. Raymond <esr@snark.thyr-
249 <H2>COMPATIBILITY</H2><PRE>
250 The <STRONG>tset</STRONG> utility has been provided for backward-compati-
251 bility with BSD environments (under most modern UNIXes,
252 <STRONG>/etc/inittab</STRONG> and <STRONG><A HREF="getty.1.html">getty(1)</A></STRONG> can set <STRONG>TERM</STRONG> appropriately for
253 each dial-up line; this obviates what was <STRONG>tset</STRONG>'s most
254 important use). This implementation behaves like 4.4BSD
255 tset, with a few exceptions specified here.
257 The <STRONG>-S</STRONG> option of BSD tset no longer works; it prints an
258 error message to stderr and dies. The <STRONG>-s</STRONG> option only sets
259 <STRONG>TERM</STRONG>, not <STRONG>TERMCAP</STRONG>. Both these changes are because the
260 <STRONG>TERMCAP</STRONG> variable is no longer supported under terminfo-
261 based <STRONG>ncurses</STRONG>, which makes <STRONG>tset</STRONG> <STRONG>-S</STRONG> useless (we made it die
262 noisily rather than silently induce lossage).
264 There was an undocumented 4.4BSD feature that invoking
265 tset via a link named `TSET` (or via any other name begin-
266 ning with an upper-case letter) set the terminal to use
267 upper-case only. This feature has been omitted.
269 The <STRONG>-A</STRONG>, <STRONG>-E</STRONG>, <STRONG>-h</STRONG>, <STRONG>-u</STRONG> and <STRONG>-v</STRONG> options were deleted from the
270 <STRONG>tset</STRONG> utility in 4.4BSD. None of them were documented in
271 4.3BSD and all are of limited utility at best. The <STRONG>-a</STRONG>,
272 <STRONG>-d</STRONG>, and <STRONG>-p</STRONG> options are similarly not documented or useful,
273 but were retained as they appear to be in widespread use.
274 It is strongly recommended that any usage of these three
275 options be changed to use the <STRONG>-m</STRONG> option instead. The <STRONG>-n</STRONG>
276 option remains, but has no effect. The <STRONG>-adnp</STRONG> options are
277 therefore omitted from the usage summary above.
279 It is still permissible to specify the <STRONG>-e</STRONG>, <STRONG>-i</STRONG>, and <STRONG>-k</STRONG>
280 options without arguments, although it is strongly recom-
281 mended that such usage be fixed to explicitly specify the
284 As of 4.4BSD, executing <STRONG>tset</STRONG> as <STRONG>reset</STRONG> no longer implies
285 the <STRONG>-Q</STRONG> option. Also, the interaction between the - option
286 and the <EM>terminal</EM> argument in some historic implementations
287 of <STRONG>tset</STRONG> has been removed.
291 <H2>ENVIRONMENT</H2><PRE>
292 The <STRONG>tset</STRONG> command uses these environment variables:
295 tells <STRONG>tset</STRONG> whether to initialize <STRONG>TERM</STRONG> using <STRONG>sh</STRONG> or <STRONG>csh</STRONG>
298 TERM Denotes your terminal type. Each terminal type is
299 distinct, though many are similar.
302 may denote the location of a termcap database. If it
303 is not an absolute pathname, e.g., begins with a `/',
304 <STRONG>tset</STRONG> removes the variable from the environment before
305 looking for the terminal description.
311 system port name to terminal type mapping database
315 terminal capability database
319 <H2>SEE ALSO</H2><PRE>
320 <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-
321 <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>
323 This describes <STRONG>ncurses</STRONG> version 5.9 (patch 20120107).
327 <STRONG><A HREF="tset.1.html">tset(1)</A></STRONG>
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