On 24 Jan 2003 18:52:00 +0000 Ricardo Santos Campos ricardo@corez23.com wrote:
This is a terminal problem of some kind, probably not one with man. Check that your TERM environment variable is set correctly.
OK- silly question now. Where is the TERM environment set? It's not in any of the .bashrc files, or in /etc/profile.env.
This is a very interesting question. My experience with HP-UX lead me, like you, to look in the system wide login profiles but it seems Linux (Debian) does things better than that.
After some experimenting I have found that the init process sets TERM to 'linux' which then gets inherited through getty and login to your login shell. That copes with the console virtual terminals - terminal emulator programs like xterm, gnome-terminal etc set it to whatever they emulate before starting the shell and telnetd and sshd set it to whatever the client end claims to have.
So, the only case that isn't handled well is modem-based dialup but that is probably rather rare these days.
Steve.