Mysterious transformation of tset(1) output on Suns

[Greg_Earle]

I have a question for the Sun gurus.  When inside the window system,
executing "tset -QS" directly from the shell gives output that
'knows' about the size (lines, columns) of the current window: 
e.g.

 % tset -QS; echo
sun Mu|sun:li#50:co#76:cl=^L:cm=\E[%i%d;%dH:nd=\E[C:up=\E[A:am:bs:km:mi:ms:
(etc.)
rs=\E[s: % 

(line broken up for readability).  Note the entries for li and co.
But lo and behold; if you should try to do anything with this output, like
put it between `` for use with eval, or even through a pipe or a redirected
output, the output suddenly mysteriously changes back to a 'normal' sun
termcap entry:

 % tset -QS | cat
sun Mu|sun:li#34:co#80:cl=^L:cm=\E[%i%d;%dH:nd=\E[C:up=\E[A:am:bs:km:mi:ms:
( etc.)
rs=\E[s: %

Or:

 % tset -QS > /tmp/foo
 % cat /tmp/foo
sun Mu|sun:li#34:co#80:cl=^L:cm=\E[%i%d;%dH:nd=\E[C:up=\E[A:am:bs:km:mi:ms:
( etc. )
rs=\E[s : % 

How/Why is this happening?  more(1) seems to know about the length of the tty
subwindow; you get everything from the top of the window down to the last 
line before more stops.  Does it get it directly from the window subsystem?
One reason I ask is that it seems like it could be a wonderful feature; 
you could put a series of statements in your .cshrc file (like the 
example given in the man page for tset with option -S) so each program 
that used $TERMCAP would know about the window limits if it wanted 
(I was thinking of modifying vnews(1) to do this, instead of the fixed 
# of lines you get).

For a minute, I thought the old "can't set your parent's env from yerself"
but that can't be it; you can muck all your other environment variables to
your hearts content inside the (non-login) shell windows.

Thanks in advance.

				Greg Earle

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