Re: Terminal errors

[Immanuel Yap <noelyap@ascus.cit.cornell.edu>]

On Mon Aug  9, 1999, John Carline wrote:
> Immanuel Yap wrote:
> 
> > On Mon Aug  9, 1999, John Carline wrote:
> > > Executing 'dselect' now gives me the error 'Error opening
> > > terminal: unknown', and in addition many other commands give
> > > similar messages. For example, if I use a pipe to less (ls |
> > > less) I get the following:  WARNING: Terminal is not fully
> > > functional.
> >
> > What does 'echo $TERM' say?
> 
> Thump! Thump! Thump! <sound of user banging head against desk> :)
> 
> Now why didn't I check that??
> 
> 
> Thanks Noel. You asked the right question, the $TERM variable was
> blank. I ran an env command and compared it to my hamm disk.  All
> the other variables looked ok. I then added "TERM=linux" and "export
> TERM" to my root .profile to see if that fixed it. It did.
> 
> However I'm sure that that's not the correct place for TERM to be
> set.  Sooooo! I've been checking files on my hamm disk in an attempt
> to find the correct spot. so far I've looked at /etc/inittab,
> .profile, .bashrc and any file I could find that said getty, login
> or init. No luck yet.
> 
> You wouldn't by any chance have another hint in you, would you? :)

Sorry, I don't have a clue.  I've never had this particular problem of
$TERM not being set at all.  I always thought it was hardwired when
you log into the console.  A quick check of 'man login' yields:

       On some installations, the  environmental  variable  $TERM
       will  be initialize to the terminal type on your tty line,
       as specified in /etc/ttytype.

but '/etc/ttytype' doesn't exist on my system.

Noel