tset(1) User commands tset(1)
NAME
tset, reset - initialize or reset terminal state
SYNOPSIS
tset [-IQVcqrsw] [-] [-e ch] [-i ch] [-k ch] [-m mapping] [terminal-
type]
reset [-IQVcqrsw] [-] [-e ch] [-i ch] [-k ch] [-m mapping] [terminal-
type]
DESCRIPTION
tset — initialization
This program initializes terminals.
First, tset retrieves the current terminal mode settings for your termi-
nal. It does this by successively testing
• the standard error,
• standard output,
• standard input and
• ultimately “/dev/tty”
to obtain terminal settings. Having retrieved these settings, tset re-
members which file descriptor to use when updating settings.
Next, tset determines the type of terminal that you are using. This de-
termination is done as follows, using the first terminal type found.
1. The terminal argument specified on the command line.
2. The value of the TERM environment variable.
3. (BSD systems only.) The terminal type associated with the standard
error output device in the /etc/ttys file. (On System V hosts and sys-
tems using that convention, getty(8) does this job by setting TERM ac-
cording to the type passed to it by /etc/inittab.)
4. The default terminal type, “unknown”, is not suitable for curses ap-
plications.
If the terminal type was not specified on the command-line, the -m op-
tion mappings are then applied; see subsection “Terminal Type Mapping”.
Then, if the terminal type begins with a question mark (“?”), the user
is prompted for confirmation of the terminal type. An empty response
confirms the type, or, another type can be entered to specify a new
type. Once the terminal type has been determined, the terminal descrip-
tion for the terminal is retrieved. If no terminal description is found
for the type, the user is prompted for another terminal type.
Once the terminal description is retrieved,
• if the “-w” option is enabled, tset may update the terminal's window
size.
If the window size cannot be obtained from the operating system, but
the terminal description (or environment, e.g., LINES and COLUMNS
variables specify this), use this to set the operating system's no-
tion of the window size.
• if the “-c” option is enabled, the backspace, interrupt and line
kill characters (among many other things) are set
• unless the “-I” option is enabled, the terminal and tab initializa-
tion strings are sent to the standard error output, and, if the ter-
minal device does not appear to be a pseudoterminal (as might be
used by a terminal emulator program), tset waits one second in case
a hardware reset was issued.
• Finally, if the erase, interrupt and line kill characters have
changed, or are not set to their default values, their values are
displayed to the standard error output.
reset — reinitialization
When invoked as reset, tset sets the terminal modes to “sane” values:
• sets canonical (“cooked”) and echo modes,
• turns off cbreak and raw modes,
• turns on newline translation and
• resets special input characters to their default values
before doing the terminal initialization described above. Also, rather
than using the terminal initialization strings, it uses the terminal re-
set strings.
The reset command is useful after a program dies leaving a terminal in
an abnormal state:
• you may have to type
<LF>reset<LF>
(the line-feed character is normally control-J) to get the terminal
to work, as carriage-return may no longer work in the abnormal
state.
• Also, the terminal will often not echo the command.
Setting the Environment
It is often desirable to enter the terminal type and information about
the terminal's capabilities into the shell's environment. This is done
using the -s option.
When the -s option is specified, the commands to enter the information
into the shell's environment are written to the standard output. If the
SHELL environment variable ends in “csh”, the commands are for csh(1),
otherwise, they are for sh(1). The csh commands set and unset the shell
variable noglob, leaving it unset. The following line in the .login or
.profile files will initialize the environment correctly:
eval `tset -s options ... `
Terminal Type Mapping
When the terminal is not hardwired into the system (or the current sys-
tem information is incorrect) the terminal type derived from the
/etc/ttys file or the TERM environment variable is often something
generic like network, dialup, or unknown. When tset is used in a
startup script it is often desirable to provide information about the
type of terminal used on such ports.
The -m options maps from some set of conditions to a terminal type, that
is, to tell tset “If I'm on this port at a particular speed, guess that
I'm on that kind of terminal”.
The argument to the -m option consists of an optional port type, an op-
tional operator, an optional baud rate specification, an optional colon
(“:”) character and a terminal type. The port type is a string (delim-
ited by either the operator or the colon character). The operator may
be any combination of “>”, “<”, “@”, and “!”; “>” means greater than,
“<” means less than, “@” means equal to and “!” inverts the sense of the
test. The baud rate is specified as a number and is compared with the
speed of the standard error output (which should be the control termi-
nal). The terminal type is a string.
If the terminal type is not specified on the command line, the -m map-
pings are applied to the terminal type. If the port type and baud rate
match the mapping, the terminal type specified in the mapping replaces
the current type. If more than one mapping is specified, the first ap-
plicable mapping is used.
For example, consider the following mapping: dialup>9600:vt100. The
port type is dialup , the operator is >, the baud rate specification is
9600, and the terminal type is vt100. The result of this mapping is to
specify that if the terminal type is dialup, and the baud rate is
greater than 9600 baud, a terminal type of vt100 will be used.
If no baud rate is specified, the terminal type will match any baud
rate. If no port type is specified, the terminal type will match any
port type. For example, -m dialup:vt100 -m :?xterm will cause any di-
alup port, regardless of baud rate, to match the terminal type vt100,
and any non-dialup port type to match the terminal type ?xterm. Note,
because of the leading question mark, the user will be queried on a de-
fault port as to whether they are actually using an xterm terminal.
No whitespace characters are permitted in the -m option argument. Also,
to avoid problems with meta-characters, it is suggested that the entire
-m option argument be placed within single quote characters, and that
csh users insert a backslash character (“\”) before any exclamation
marks (“!”).
OPTIONS
The options are as follows:
-c Set control characters and modes.
-e ch
Set the erase character to ch.
-I Do not send the terminal or tab initialization strings to the ter-
minal.
-i ch
Set the interrupt character to ch.
-k ch
Set the line kill character to ch.
-m mapping
Specify a mapping from a port type to a terminal; see subsection
“Terminal Type Mapping”.
-Q Do not display any values for the erase, interrupt and line kill
characters. Normally tset displays the values for control charac-
ters which differ from the system's default values.
-q The terminal type is displayed to the standard output, and the ter-
minal is not initialized in any way. The option “-” by itself is
equivalent but archaic.
-r Print the terminal type to the standard error output.
-s Print the sequence of shell commands to initialize the environment
variable TERM to the standard output; see subsection “Setting the
Environment”.
-V reports the version of ncurses which was used in this program, and
exits.
-w Resize the window to match the size deduced via
setupterm(3NCURSES). Normally this has no effect, unless setupterm
is not able to detect the window size.
The arguments for the -e, -i, and -k options may either be entered as
actual characters or by using the “hat” notation, i.e., control-h may be
specified as “^H” or “^h”.
If neither -c or -w is given, both options are assumed.
ENVIRONMENT
The tset command uses these environment variables:
SHELL
tells tset whether to initialize TERM using sh(1) or csh(1) syntax.
TERM Denotes your terminal type. Each terminal type is distinct, though
many are similar.
TERMCAP
may denote the location of a termcap database. If it is not an ab-
solute pathname, e.g., begins with a “/”, tset removes the variable
from the environment before looking for the terminal description.
FILES
/etc/ttys
system port name to terminal type mapping database (BSD versions
only).
/etc/terminfo
compiled terminal description database directory
PORTABILITY
Neither IEEE Std 1003.1/The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 7
(POSIX.1-2008) nor X/Open Curses Issue 7 documents tset or reset.
The AT&T tput utility (AIX, HP-UX, Solaris) incorporated the terminal-
mode manipulation as well as termcap-based features such as resetting
tabstops from tset in BSD (4.1c), presumably with the intention of mak-
ing tset obsolete. However, each of those systems still provides tset.
In fact, the commonly-used reset utility is always an alias for tset.
The tset utility provides backward compatibility with BSD environments;
under most modern Unices, /etc/inittab and getty(8) can set TERM appro-
priately for each dial-up line, obviating what was tset's most important
use. This implementation behaves like 4.4BSD tset, with a few excep-
tions we shall consider now.
A few options are different because the TERMCAP variable is no longer
supported under terminfo-based ncurses:
• The -S option of BSD tset no longer works; it prints an error mes-
sage to the standard error and dies.
• The -s option only sets TERM, not TERMCAP.
There was an undocumented 4.4BSD feature that invoking tset via a link
named “TSET” (or via any other name beginning with an upper-case letter)
set the terminal to use upper-case only. This feature has been omitted.
The -A, -E, -h, -u and -v options were deleted from the tset utility in
4.4BSD. None of them were documented in 4.3BSD and all are of limited
utility at best. The -a, -d, and -p options are similarly not docu-
mented or useful, but were retained as they appear to be in widespread
use. It is strongly recommended that any usage of these three options
be changed to use the -m option instead. The -a, -d, and -p options are
therefore omitted from the usage summary above.
Very old systems, e.g., 3BSD, used a different terminal driver which was
replaced in 4BSD in the early 1980s. To accommodate these older sys-
tems, the 4BSD tset provided a -n option to specify that the new termi-
nal driver should be used. This implementation does not provide that
choice.
It is still permissible to specify the -e, -i, and -k options without
arguments, although it is strongly recommended that such usage be fixed
to explicitly specify the character.
As of 4.4BSD, executing tset as reset no longer implies the -Q option.
Also, the interaction between the - option and the terminal argument in
some historic implementations of tset has been removed.
The -c and -w options are not found in earlier implementations. How-
ever, a different window size-change feature was provided in 4.4BSD.
• In 4.4BSD, tset uses the window size from the termcap description to
set the window size if tset is not able to obtain the window size
from the operating system.
• In ncurses, tset obtains the window size using setupterm(3NCURSES),
which may be from the operating system, the LINES and COLUMNS envi-
ronment variables or the terminal description.
Obtaining the window size from a terminal's type description is common
to both implementations, but considered obsolescent. Its only practical
use is for hardware terminals. Generally, the window size will remain
uninitialized only if there were a problem obtaining the value from the
operating system (and setupterm would still fail). The LINES and
COLUMNS environment variables may thus be useful for working around win-
dow-size problems, but have the drawback that if the window is resized,
their values must be recomputed and reassigned. The resize(1) program
distributed with xterm(1) assists this activity.
HISTORY
A reset command written by Kurt Shoens appeared in 1BSD (March 1978).
It set the erase and kill characters to ^H (backspace) and @ respec-
tively. Mark Horton improved this reset in 3BSD (October 1979), adding
intr, quit, start/stop, and eof characters as well as changing the pro-
gram to avoid modifying any user settings. That version of reset did
not use termcap.
Eric Allman wrote a distinct tset command for 1BSD, using a forerunner
of termcap called ttycap. Allman's comments in the source code indicate
that he began work in October 1977, continuing development over the next
few years. By late 1979, it had migrated to termcap and handled the
TERMCAP variable. Later comments indicate that tset was modified in
September 1980 to use logic copied from the 3BSD “reset” program when it
was invoked as reset. This version appeared in 4.1cBSD, late in 1982.
Other developers such as Keith Bostic and Jim Bloom continued to modify
tset until 4.4BSD was released in 1993.
The ncurses implementation was lightly adapted from the 4.4BSD sources
to use the terminfo API by Eric S. Raymond <esr@snark.thyrsus.com>.
SEE ALSO
csh(1), sh(1), stty(1), terminfo(3NCURSES), tty(4), terminfo(5),
ttys(4), environ(7)
ncurses 6.5 2025-01-18 tset(1)
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