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29 * @Id: tset.1,v 1.37 2016/05/21 23:36:51 tom Exp @
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41 <H1 class="no-header">tset 1</H1>
43 <STRONG><A HREF="tset.1.html">tset(1)</A></STRONG> <STRONG><A HREF="tset.1.html">tset(1)</A></STRONG>
48 </PRE><H2><a name="h2-NAME">NAME</a></H2><PRE>
49 <STRONG>tset</STRONG>, <STRONG>reset</STRONG> - terminal initialization
52 </PRE><H2><a name="h2-SYNOPSIS">SYNOPSIS</a></H2><PRE>
53 <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>]
55 <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>]
59 </PRE><H2><a name="h2-DESCRIPTION">DESCRIPTION</a></H2><PRE>
61 </PRE><H3><a name="h3-tset---initialization">tset - initialization</a></H3><PRE>
62 <STRONG>Tset</STRONG> initializes terminals. <STRONG>Tset</STRONG> first determines the
63 type of terminal that you are using. This determination
64 is done as follows, using the first terminal type found.
66 1. The <STRONG>terminal</STRONG> argument specified on the command line.
68 2. The value of the <STRONG>TERM</STRONG> environmental variable.
70 3. (BSD systems only.) The terminal type associated with
71 the standard error output device in the <EM>/etc/ttys</EM> file.
72 (On System-V-like UNIXes and systems using that conven-
73 tion, <EM>getty</EM> does this job by setting <STRONG>TERM</STRONG> according to the
74 type passed to it by <EM>/etc/inittab</EM>.)
76 4. The default terminal type, "unknown".
78 If the terminal type was not specified on the command-
79 line, the <STRONG>-m</STRONG> option mappings are then applied (see the
80 section <STRONG>TERMINAL</STRONG> <STRONG>TYPE</STRONG> <STRONG>MAPPING</STRONG> for more information).
81 Then, if the terminal type begins with a question mark
82 ("?"), the user is prompted for confirmation of the termi-
83 nal type. An empty response confirms the type, or,
84 another type can be entered to specify a new type. Once
85 the terminal type has been determined, the terminfo entry
86 for the terminal is retrieved. If no terminfo entry is
87 found for the type, the user is prompted for another ter-
90 Once the terminfo entry is retrieved, the window size,
91 backspace, interrupt and line kill characters (among many
92 other things) are set and the terminal and tab initializa-
93 tion strings are sent to the standard error output.
94 Finally, if the erase, interrupt and line kill characters
95 have changed, or are not set to their default values,
96 their values are displayed to the standard error output.
99 </PRE><H3><a name="h3-reset---reinitialization">reset - reinitialization</a></H3><PRE>
100 When invoked as <STRONG>reset</STRONG>, <STRONG>tset</STRONG> sets cooked and echo modes,
101 turns off cbreak and raw modes, turns on newline transla-
102 tion and resets any unset special characters to their
103 default values before doing the terminal initialization
104 described above. This is useful after a program dies
105 leaving a terminal in an abnormal state. Note, you may
108 <STRONG><LF>reset<LF></STRONG>
110 (the line-feed character is normally control-J) to get the
111 terminal to work, as carriage-return may no longer work in
112 the abnormal state. Also, the terminal will often not
116 </PRE><H2><a name="h2-OPTIONS">OPTIONS</a></H2><PRE>
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 "^h".
160 If neither <STRONG>-c</STRONG> or <STRONG>-w</STRONG> is given, both options are assumed.
163 </PRE><H2><a name="h2-SETTING-THE-ENVIRONMENT">SETTING THE ENVIRONMENT</a></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 ... `
180 </PRE><H2><a name="h2-TERMINAL-TYPE-MAPPING">TERMINAL TYPE MAPPING</a></H2><PRE>
181 When the terminal is not hardwired into the system (or the
182 current system information is incorrect) the terminal type
183 derived from the <EM>/etc/ttys</EM> file or the <STRONG>TERM</STRONG> environmental
184 variable is often something generic like <STRONG>network</STRONG>, <STRONG>dialup</STRONG>,
185 or <STRONG>unknown</STRONG>. When <STRONG>tset</STRONG> is used in a startup script it is
186 often desirable to provide information about the type of
187 terminal used on such ports.
189 The purpose of the <STRONG>-m</STRONG> option is to map from some set of
190 conditions to a terminal type, that is, to tell <STRONG>tset</STRONG> "If
191 I'm on this port at a particular speed, guess that I'm on
192 that kind of terminal".
194 The argument to the <STRONG>-m</STRONG> option consists of an optional port
195 type, an optional operator, an optional baud rate specifi-
196 cation, an optional colon (":") character and a terminal
197 type. The port type is a string (delimited by either the
198 operator or the colon character). The operator may be any
199 combination of ">", "<", "@", and "!"; ">" means greater
200 than, "<" means less than, "@" means equal to and "!"
201 inverts the sense of the test. The baud rate is specified
202 as a number and is compared with the speed of the standard
203 error output (which should be the control terminal). The
204 terminal type is a string.
206 If the terminal type is not specified on the command line,
207 the <STRONG>-m</STRONG> mappings are applied to the terminal type. If the
208 port type and baud rate match the mapping, the terminal
209 type specified in the mapping replaces the current type.
210 If more than one mapping is specified, the first applica-
213 For example, consider the following mapping:
214 <STRONG>dialup>9600:vt100</STRONG>. The port type is dialup , the operator
215 is >, the baud rate specification is 9600, and the termi-
216 nal type is vt100. The result of this mapping is to spec-
217 ify that if the terminal type is <STRONG>dialup</STRONG>, and the baud rate
218 is greater than 9600 baud, a terminal type of <STRONG>vt100</STRONG> will
221 If no baud rate is specified, the terminal type will match
222 any baud rate. If no port type is specified, the terminal
223 type will match any port type. For example, <STRONG>-m</STRONG>
224 <STRONG>dialup:vt100</STRONG> <STRONG>-m</STRONG> <STRONG>:?xterm</STRONG> will cause any dialup port,
225 regardless of baud rate, to match the terminal type vt100,
226 and any non-dialup port type to match the terminal type
227 ?xterm. Note, because of the leading question mark, the
228 user will be queried on a default port as to whether they
229 are actually using an xterm terminal.
231 No whitespace characters are permitted in the <STRONG>-m</STRONG> option
232 argument. Also, to avoid problems with meta-characters,
233 it is suggested that the entire <STRONG>-m</STRONG> option argument be
234 placed within single quote characters, and that <STRONG>csh</STRONG> users
235 insert a backslash character ("\") before any exclamation
239 </PRE><H2><a name="h2-HISTORY">HISTORY</a></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-
246 </PRE><H2><a name="h2-COMPATIBILITY">COMPATIBILITY</a></H2><PRE>
247 Neither IEEE Std 1003.1/The Open Group Base Specifications
248 Issue 7 (POSIX.1-2008) nor X/Open Curses Issue 7 documents
249 <STRONG>tset</STRONG> or <STRONG>reset</STRONG>.
251 The <STRONG>tset</STRONG> utility has been provided for backward-compati-
252 bility with BSD environments (under most modern UNIXes,
253 <STRONG>/etc/inittab</STRONG> and <STRONG>getty(1)</STRONG> can set <STRONG>TERM</STRONG> appropriately for
254 each dial-up line; this obviates what was <STRONG>tset</STRONG>'s most
255 important use). This implementation behaves like 4.4BSD
256 tset, with a few exceptions specified here.
258 The <STRONG>-S</STRONG> option of BSD tset no longer works; it prints an
259 error message to stderr and dies. The <STRONG>-s</STRONG> option only sets
260 <STRONG>TERM</STRONG>, not <STRONG>TERMCAP</STRONG>. Both of these changes are because the
261 <STRONG>TERMCAP</STRONG> variable is no longer supported under terminfo-
262 based <STRONG>ncurses</STRONG>, which makes <STRONG>tset</STRONG> <STRONG>-S</STRONG> useless (we made it die
263 noisily rather than silently induce lossage).
265 There was an undocumented 4.4BSD feature that invoking
266 <STRONG>tset</STRONG> via a link named "TSET" (or via any other name begin-
267 ning with an upper-case letter) set the terminal to use
268 upper-case only. This feature has been omitted.
270 The <STRONG>-A</STRONG>, <STRONG>-E</STRONG>, <STRONG>-h</STRONG>, <STRONG>-u</STRONG> and <STRONG>-v</STRONG> options were deleted from the
271 <STRONG>tset</STRONG> utility in 4.4BSD. None of them were documented in
272 4.3BSD and all are of limited utility at best. The <STRONG>-a</STRONG>,
273 <STRONG>-d</STRONG>, and <STRONG>-p</STRONG> options are similarly not documented or useful,
274 but were retained as they appear to be in widespread use.
275 It is strongly recommended that any usage of these three
276 options be changed to use the <STRONG>-m</STRONG> option instead. The <STRONG>-a</STRONG>,
277 <STRONG>-d</STRONG>, and <STRONG>-p</STRONG> options are therefore omitted from the usage
280 Very old systems, e.g., 3BSD, used a different terminal
281 driver which was replaced in 4BSD in the early 1980s. To
282 accommodate these older systems, the 4BSD <STRONG>tset</STRONG> provided a
283 <STRONG>-n</STRONG> option to specify that the new terminal driver should
284 be used. This implementation does not provide that
287 It is still permissible to specify the <STRONG>-e</STRONG>, <STRONG>-i</STRONG>, and <STRONG>-k</STRONG>
288 options without arguments, although it is strongly recom-
289 mended that such usage be fixed to explicitly specify the
292 As of 4.4BSD, executing <STRONG>tset</STRONG> as <STRONG>reset</STRONG> no longer implies
293 the <STRONG>-Q</STRONG> option. Also, the interaction between the - option
294 and the <EM>terminal</EM> argument in some historic implementations
295 of <STRONG>tset</STRONG> has been removed.
297 The <STRONG>-c</STRONG> and <STRONG>-w</STRONG> options are not found in earlier implementa-
298 tions. However, a different window size-change feature
299 was provided in 4.4BSD.
301 <STRONG>o</STRONG> In 4.4BSD, <STRONG>tset</STRONG> uses the window size from the termcap
302 description to set the window size if <STRONG>tset</STRONG> is not able
303 to obtain the window size from the operating system.
305 <STRONG>o</STRONG> In ncurses, <STRONG>tset</STRONG> obtains the window size using
306 <STRONG>setupterm</STRONG>, which may be from the operating system, the
307 <STRONG>LINES</STRONG> and <STRONG>COLUMNS</STRONG> environment variables or the termi-
310 Obtaining the window size from the terminal description is
311 common to both implementations, but considered obsoles-
312 cent. Its only practical use is for hardware terminals.
313 Generally speaking, a window size would be unset only if
314 there were some problem obtaining the value from the oper-
315 ating system (and <STRONG>setupterm</STRONG> would still fail). For that
316 reason, the <STRONG>LINES</STRONG> and <STRONG>COLUMNS</STRONG> environment variables may be
317 useful for working around window-size problems. Those
318 have the drawback that if the window is resized, those
319 variables must be recomputed and reassigned. To do this
320 more easily, use the <STRONG><A HREF="resize.1.html">resize(1)</A></STRONG> program.
323 </PRE><H2><a name="h2-ENVIRONMENT">ENVIRONMENT</a></H2><PRE>
324 The <STRONG>tset</STRONG> command uses these environment variables:
327 tells <STRONG>tset</STRONG> whether to initialize <STRONG>TERM</STRONG> using <STRONG>sh</STRONG> or <STRONG>csh</STRONG>
330 TERM Denotes your terminal type. Each terminal type is
331 distinct, though many are similar.
334 may denote the location of a termcap database. If it
335 is not an absolute pathname, e.g., begins with a "/",
336 <STRONG>tset</STRONG> removes the variable from the environment before
337 looking for the terminal description.
340 </PRE><H2><a name="h2-FILES">FILES</a></H2><PRE>
342 system port name to terminal type mapping database
346 terminal capability database
349 </PRE><H2><a name="h2-SEE-ALSO">SEE ALSO</a></H2><PRE>
350 <STRONG>csh(1)</STRONG>, <STRONG>sh(1)</STRONG>, <STRONG>stty(1)</STRONG>, <STRONG><A HREF="curs_terminfo.3x.html">curs_terminfo(3x)</A></STRONG>, <STRONG>tty(4)</STRONG>,
351 <STRONG><A HREF="terminfo.5.html">terminfo(5)</A></STRONG>, <STRONG>ttys(5)</STRONG>, <STRONG>environ(7)</STRONG>
353 This describes <STRONG>ncurses</STRONG> version 6.0 (patch 20160611).
357 <STRONG><A HREF="tset.1.html">tset(1)</A></STRONG>
361 <li><a href="#h2-NAME">NAME</a></li>
362 <li><a href="#h2-SYNOPSIS">SYNOPSIS</a></li>
363 <li><a href="#h2-DESCRIPTION">DESCRIPTION</a>
365 <li><a href="#h3-tset---initialization">tset - initialization</a></li>
366 <li><a href="#h3-reset---reinitialization">reset - reinitialization</a></li>
369 <li><a href="#h2-OPTIONS">OPTIONS</a></li>
370 <li><a href="#h2-SETTING-THE-ENVIRONMENT">SETTING THE ENVIRONMENT</a></li>
371 <li><a href="#h2-TERMINAL-TYPE-MAPPING">TERMINAL TYPE MAPPING</a></li>
372 <li><a href="#h2-HISTORY">HISTORY</a></li>
373 <li><a href="#h2-COMPATIBILITY">COMPATIBILITY</a></li>
374 <li><a href="#h2-ENVIRONMENT">ENVIRONMENT</a></li>
375 <li><a href="#h2-FILES">FILES</a></li>
376 <li><a href="#h2-SEE-ALSO">SEE ALSO</a></li>