tset

I've removed advertising from most of this site and will eventually clean up the few pages where it remains.

While not terribly expensive to maintain, this does cost me something. If I don't get enough donations to cover that expense, I will be shutting the site down in early 2020.

If you found something useful today, please consider a small donation.

Some material is very old and may be incorrect today

© November 2003 Tony Lawrence

Set and initialize terminal type. Not entirely useless nowadays, though when dumb terminals were more common, so was this. You'd have a tset line in your .profile:

eval `tset -m vt100:vt100 -m
ansi:${TERM:-ansi} -m :\?${TERM:-ansi}
-e -r -s -Q`
 

If your terminal was not known (either from /etc/ttytype or from the TERM environment variable), that line would cause you to be prompted with

TERM = (ansi)
 

What's happening there is that the "tset" program in your .profile is telling you that it will assume you are an "ansi" terminal unless you tell it differently. Ordinarily you would just hit ENTER to accept "ansi", but you could type "wyse60" or "vt100" or any other valid terminal name if you were not, in fact, using an ansi terminal.

Tset would then output the proper initialization strings for your terminal.

See Termcap and Terminfo for more. -

If you found something useful today, please consider a small donation.

Got something to add? Send me email.

---

Have you tried Searching this site?

This is a Unix/Linux resource website. It contains technical articles about Unix, Linux and general computing related subjects, opinion, news, help files, how-to's, tutorials and more.

Contact us