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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 tset [-IQVqrs] [-] [-e <EM>ch</EM>] [-i <EM>ch</EM>] [-k <EM>ch</EM>] [-m <EM>mapping</EM>]
57 reset [-IQVqrs] [-] [-e <EM>ch</EM>] [-i <EM>ch</EM>] [-k <EM>ch</EM>] [-m <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 below
81 for more information). Then, if the terminal type begins
82 with a question mark (``?''), the user is prompted for
83 confirmation of the terminal type. An empty response con-
84 firms the type, or, another type can be entered to specify
85 a new type. Once the terminal type has been determined,
86 the terminfo entry for the terminal is retrieved. If no
87 terminfo entry is found for the type, the user is prompted
88 for another terminal type.
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.
98 When invoked as <STRONG>reset</STRONG>, <STRONG>tset</STRONG> sets cooked and echo modes,
99 turns off cbreak and raw modes, turns on newline transla-
100 tion and resets any unset special characters to their
101 default values before doing the terminal initialization
102 described above. This is useful after a program dies
103 leaving a terminal in an abnormal state. Note, you may
106 <STRONG><LF>reset<LF></STRONG>
108 (the line-feed character is normally control-J) to get the
109 terminal to work, as carriage-return may no longer work in
110 the abnormal state. Also, the terminal will often not
113 The options are as follows:
115 <STRONG>-q</STRONG> The terminal type is displayed to the standard out-
116 put, and the terminal is not initialized in any way.
117 The option `-' by itself is equivalent but archaic.
119 <STRONG>-e</STRONG> Set the erase character to <EM>ch</EM>.
121 <STRONG>-I</STRONG> Do not send the terminal or tab initialization
122 strings to the terminal.
124 <STRONG>-Q</STRONG> Don't display any values for the erase, interrupt and
125 line kill characters.
127 <STRONG>-V</STRONG> reports the version of ncurses which was used in this
130 <STRONG>-i</STRONG> Set the interrupt character to <EM>ch</EM>.
132 <STRONG>-k</STRONG> Set the line kill character to <EM>ch</EM>.
134 <STRONG>-m</STRONG> Specify a mapping from a port type to a terminal.
135 See below for more information.
137 <STRONG>-r</STRONG> Print the terminal type to the standard error output.
139 <STRONG>-s</STRONG> Print the sequence of shell commands to initialize
140 the environment variable <STRONG>TERM</STRONG> to the standard output.
141 See the section below on setting the environment for
144 The arguments for the <STRONG>-e</STRONG>, <STRONG>-i</STRONG>, and <STRONG>-k</STRONG> options may either be
145 entered as actual characters or by using the `hat' nota-
146 tion, i.e. control-h may be specified as ``^H'' or ``^h''.
150 <H2>SETTING THE ENVIRONMENT</H2><PRE>
151 It is often desirable to enter the terminal type and
152 information about the terminal's capabilities into the
153 shell's environment. This is done using the <STRONG>-s</STRONG> option.
155 When the <STRONG>-s</STRONG> option is specified, the commands to enter the
156 information into the shell's environment are written to
157 the standard output. If the <STRONG>SHELL</STRONG> environmental variable
158 ends in ``csh'', the commands are for <STRONG>csh</STRONG>, otherwise, they
159 are for <STRONG>sh</STRONG>. Note, the <STRONG>csh</STRONG> commands set and unset the
160 shell variable <STRONG>noglob</STRONG>, leaving it unset. The following
161 line in the <STRONG>.login</STRONG> or <STRONG>.profile</STRONG> files will initialize the
162 environment correctly:
164 eval `tset -s options ... `
169 <H2>TERMINAL TYPE MAPPING</H2><PRE>
170 When the terminal is not hardwired into the system (or the
171 current system information is incorrect) the terminal type
172 derived from the <EM>/etc/ttys</EM> file or the <STRONG>TERM</STRONG> environmental
173 variable is often something generic like <STRONG>network</STRONG>, <STRONG>dialup</STRONG>,
174 or <STRONG>unknown</STRONG>. When <STRONG>tset</STRONG> is used in a startup script it is
175 often desirable to provide information about the type of
176 terminal used on such ports.
178 The purpose of the <STRONG>-m</STRONG> option is to map from some set of
179 conditions to a terminal type, that is, to tell <STRONG>tset</STRONG> ``If
180 I'm on this port at a particular speed, guess that I'm on
181 that kind of terminal''.
183 The argument to the <STRONG>-m</STRONG> option consists of an optional port
184 type, an optional operator, an optional baud rate
185 specification, an optional colon (``:'') character and a
186 terminal type. The port type is a string (delimited by
187 either the operator or the colon character). The operator
188 may be any combination of ``>'', ``<'', ``@'', and ``!'';
189 ``>'' means greater than, ``<'' means less than, ``@''
190 means equal to and ``!'' inverts the sense of the test.
191 The baud rate is specified as a number and is compared
192 with the speed of the standard error output (which should
193 be the control terminal). The terminal type is a string.
195 If the terminal type is not specified on the command line,
196 the <STRONG>-m</STRONG> mappings are applied to the terminal type. If the
197 port type and baud rate match the mapping, the terminal
198 type specified in the mapping replaces the current type.
199 If more than one mapping is specified, the first applica-
202 For example, consider the following mapping:
203 <STRONG>dialup>9600:vt100</STRONG>. The port type is dialup , the operator
204 is >, the baud rate specification is 9600, and the termi-
205 nal type is vt100. The result of this mapping is to spec-
206 ify that if the terminal type is <STRONG>dialup</STRONG>, and the baud rate
207 is greater than 9600 baud, a terminal type of <STRONG>vt100</STRONG> will
210 If no baud rate is specified, the terminal type will match
211 any baud rate. If no port type is specified, the terminal
212 type will match any port type. For example, <STRONG>-m</STRONG>
213 <STRONG>dialup:vt100</STRONG> <STRONG>-m</STRONG> <STRONG>:?xterm</STRONG> will cause any dialup port,
214 regardless of baud rate, to match the terminal type vt100,
215 and any non-dialup port type to match the terminal type
216 ?xterm. Note, because of the leading question mark, the
217 user will be queried on a default port as to whether they
218 are actually using an xterm terminal.
220 No whitespace characters are permitted in the <STRONG>-m</STRONG> option
221 argument. Also, to avoid problems with meta-characters,
222 it is suggested that the entire <STRONG>-m</STRONG> option argument be
223 placed within single quote characters, and that <STRONG>csh</STRONG> users
224 insert a backslash character (``\'') before any exclama-
229 <H2>HISTORY</H2><PRE>
230 The <STRONG>tset</STRONG> command appeared in BSD 3.0. The <STRONG>ncurses</STRONG> imple-
231 mentation was lightly adapted from the 4.4BSD sources for
232 a terminfo environment by Eric S. Raymond <esr@snark.thyr-
237 <H2>COMPATIBILITY</H2><PRE>
238 The <STRONG>tset</STRONG> utility has been provided for backward-compati-
239 bility with BSD environments (under most modern UNIXes,
240 <STRONG>/etc/inittab</STRONG> and <STRONG><A HREF="getty.1.html">getty(1)</A></STRONG> can set <STRONG>TERM</STRONG> appropriately for
241 each dial-up line; this obviates what was <STRONG>tset</STRONG>'s most
242 important use). This implementation behaves like 4.4BSD
243 tset, with a few exceptions specified here.
245 The <STRONG>-S</STRONG> option of BSD tset no longer works; it prints an
246 error message to stderr and dies. The <STRONG>-s</STRONG> option only sets
247 <STRONG>TERM</STRONG>, not <STRONG>TERMCAP</STRONG>. Both these changes are because the
248 <STRONG>TERMCAP</STRONG> variable is no longer supported under terminfo-
249 based <STRONG>ncurses</STRONG>, which makes <STRONG>tset</STRONG> <STRONG>-S</STRONG> useless (we made it die
250 noisily rather than silently induce lossage).
252 There was an undocumented 4.4BSD feature that invoking
253 tset via a link named `TSET` (or via any other name begin-
254 ning with an upper-case letter) set the terminal to use
255 upper-case only. This feature has been omitted.
257 The <STRONG>-A</STRONG>, <STRONG>-E</STRONG>, <STRONG>-h</STRONG>, <STRONG>-u</STRONG> and <STRONG>-v</STRONG> options were deleted from the
258 <STRONG>tset</STRONG> utility in 4.4BSD. None of them were documented in
259 4.3BSD and all are of limited utility at best. The <STRONG>-a</STRONG>, -,
261 options are similarly not documented or useful, but were
262 retained as they appear to be in widespread use. It is
263 strongly recommended that any usage of these three options
264 be changed to use the <STRONG>-m</STRONG> option instead. The -n option
265 remains, but has no effect. The <STRONG>-adnp</STRONG> options are there-
266 fore omitted from the usage summary above.
268 It is still permissible to specify the <STRONG>-e</STRONG>, <STRONG>-i</STRONG>, and <STRONG>-k</STRONG>
269 options without arguments, although it is strongly recom-
270 mended that such usage be fixed to explicitly specify the
273 As of 4.4BSD, executing <STRONG>tset</STRONG> as <STRONG>reset</STRONG> no longer implies
274 the <STRONG>-Q</STRONG> option. Also, the interaction between the - option
275 and the <EM>terminal</EM> argument in some historic implementations
276 of <STRONG>tset</STRONG> has been removed.
280 <H2>ENVIRONMENT</H2><PRE>
281 The <STRONG>tset</STRONG> command uses the <STRONG>SHELL</STRONG> and <STRONG>TERM</STRONG> environment vari-
288 system port name to terminal type mapping database
292 terminal capability database
296 <H2>SEE ALSO</H2><PRE>
297 <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-
298 <STRONG><A HREF="ron.7.html">ron(7)</A></STRONG>
303 <STRONG><A HREF="tset.1.html">tset(1)</A></STRONG>
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