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HTML rendering created 2026-01-16 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | ENVIRONMENT | FILES | PORTABILITY | HISTORY | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
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tset(1) User commands tset(1)
tset, reset - initialize or reset terminal state
tset [-IQVcqrsw] [-] [-e ch] [-i ch] [-k ch] [-m mapping]
[terminal-type]
reset [-IQVcqrsw] [-] [-e ch] [-i ch] [-k ch] [-m mapping]
[terminal-type]
[1mtset[24m — initialization
This program initializes terminals.
First, tset retrieves the current terminal mode settings for your
terminal. 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 remembers which file descriptor to use when updating
settings.
Next, tset determines the type of terminal that you are using.
This determination 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 systems using that convention, getty(8) does this job by
setting TERM according to the type passed to it by /etc/inittab.)
4. The default terminal type, “unknown”, is not suitable for
curses applications.
If the terminal type was not specified on the command-line, the -m
option 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 description 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 notion 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
initialization strings are sent to the standard error output,
and, if the terminal 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.
[1mreset[24m — 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 reset 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
system 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 optional operator, an optional baud rate specification, an
optional colon (“:”) character and a terminal type. The port type
is a string (delimited 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 terminal). The
terminal type is a string.
If the terminal type is not specified on the command line, the -m
mappings 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 applicable 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 dialup 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 default 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 (“!”).
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
terminal.
-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 characters which differ from the system's default
values.
-q The terminal type is displayed to the standard output, and
the terminal 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(3X). 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.
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 absolute pathname, e.g., begins with a “/”, tset removes
the variable from the environment before looking for the
terminal description.
/etc/ttys
system port name to terminal type mapping database (BSD
versions only).
terminfo
compiled terminal description database directory
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 making 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 appropriately for each dial-up line, obviating what
was tset's most important use. This implementation behaves like
4.4BSD tset, with a few exceptions 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
message 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 documented 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 systems, the 4BSD tset provided a -n option to specify
that the new terminal 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.
However, 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(3X),
which may be from the operating system, the LINES and COLUMNS
environment 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 window-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.
A reset command written by Kurt Shoens appeared in 1BSD (March
1978). It set the erase and kill characters to ^H (backspace) and
@ respectively. Mark Horton improved this reset in 3BSD (October
1979), adding intr, quit, start/stop, and eof characters as well
as changing the program 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>.
csh(1), sh(1), stty(1), curs_terminfo(3X), tty(4), terminfo(5),
ttys(5), environ(7)
This page is part of the ncurses (new curses) project.
Information about the project can be found at
⟨https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ncurses.html⟩. If you have a
bug report for this manual page, send it to bug-ncurses@gnu.org.
This page was obtained from the tarball ncurses-6.6.tar.gz fetched
from ⟨https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/ncurses/⟩ on 2026-01-16. If you
discover any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page,
or you believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for the
page, or you have corrections or improvements to the information
in this COLOPHON (which is not part of the original manual page),
send a mail to man-pages@man7.org
ncurses @NCURSES_MAJOR@.@NCU... 2025-01-18 tset(1)
Pages that refer to this page: tabs(1), tput(1), ncurses(3x), termios(3), console_codes(4), ttytype(5), term(7), termio(7)
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HTML rendering created 2026-01-16 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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