tset \- set terminal modes
causes terminal dependent processing such as setting
erase and kill characters, setting or resetting delays,
of terminal involved, names for which are specified by the
does necessary initializations and mode settings.
In the case where no argument types are specified,
simply reads the terminal type out of the environment variable TERM
and re-initializes the terminal. The rest of this manual concerns
itself with type initialization, done typically once at login, and options
used at initialization time to determine the terminal type and set up
When used in a startup script
users) it is desirable to give information about the types of terminal
usually used on terminals which are not hardwired.
These ports are initially identified as being
what terminal type is usually used on these ports
is followed by the appropriate port type identifier,
an optional baud-rate specification,
and the terminal type to be used if the mapping conditions are satisfied.
If more than one mapping is specified, the first applicable mapping prevails.
A missing type identifier matches all identifiers.
Baud rates are specified as with
and are compared with the
speed of the diagnostic output (which is almost always the control terminal).
The baud rate test may be any combination of:
inverts the sense of the test. To avoid problems with metacharacters, it
is best to place the entire argument to
within ``\''' characters; users of
must also put a ``\e'' before any ``!'' used here.
tset \-m \'dialup>300:adm3a\' \-m dialup:dw2 \-m \'plugboard:?adm3a\'
causes the terminal type to be set to an
if the port in use is a dialup at a speed greater than 300 baud;
if the port is (otherwise) a dialup (i.e. at 300 baud or less).
above begins with a question mark,
the user is asked if s/he really wants that type.
A null response means to use that type;
otherwise, another type can be entered which will be used instead.
Thus, in this case, the user will be queried on a plugboard port
as to whether they are using an
For other ports the port type will be taken from the
/etc/ttytype file or a final, default
option may be given on the command line not preceded by a
It is often desirable to return the terminal type, as specified by the
options, and information about the terminal
to a shell's environment. This can be done using the
option; using the Bourne shell,
eval \`tset \-s \fIoptions...\fR\`
setenv noglob; eval \`tset \-s \fIoptions...\fR\`
to generate as output a sequence of shell commands which place the variables
TERM and TERMCAP in the environment; see
Once the terminal type is known,
engages in terminal mode setting.
This normally involves sending an initialization sequence to the
terminal and setting the single character erase (and optionally
the line-kill (full line erase)) characters.
On terminals that can backspace but not overstrike
and when the erase character is the default erase character
(`#' on standard systems),
the erase character is changed to a Control-H
set the erase character to be the named character
the default being the backspace character on the terminal, usually ^H.
but for the line kill character rather than the erase character;
defaults to ^X (for purely historical reasons); ^U is the preferred setting.
No kill processing is done if
supresses outputting terminal initialization strings.
``Erase set to'' and ``Kill set to'' messages.
Outputs the strings to be assigned to
TERM and TERMCAP in the environment rather than commands for a shell.
/etc/ttytype terminal id to type map database
/etc/termcap terminal capability database
csh(1), setenv(1), sh(1), stty(1), environ(5), ttytype(5), termcap(5)
For compatibility with earlier versions of
a number of flags are accepted whose use is discouraged:
Sets the erase character to
only if the terminal can backspace.
prints the terminal type on the standard output
prints the terminal type on the diagnostic output.