How do you ask a terminal what it is?

[uunet!bria!mike]

In an article, Jim Walker writes:
>The trouble with this suggestion is, how does the TERM environment variable
>get set correctly?  It's normally set with the .login or .cshrc file,
>right?  The trouble is that some of our users, especially grad students
>without terminals of their own, may log in on one type of terminal one day
>and another type the next.  I myself have a VT330 (a ReGIS terminal) at
>work and a VT100 emulator at home.

Use tset(1).

The TERM environment should be initially established by the logger; for
modem ports and the like, an ambiguous terminal type (such as "dialup"
or "unknown") is specified.  Then, in .profile or whatever, you would have
a line that looks like:

	eval `tset -h -m dialup:\?vt100 -s -Q -I`

If you don't have the tset(1) program, it isn't terribly hard to find.
-- 
Michael Stefanik, Systems Engineer (JOAT), Briareus Corporation
UUCP: ...!uunet!bria!mike
--
technoignorami (tek'no-ig'no-ram`i) a group of individuals that are constantly
found to be saying things like "Well, it works on my DOS machine ..."