Samuel Wales <samologist@gmail.com> writes:

> ok, so this is going to be a really dumb question that i should have
> figured out over the years.  and ... i sorta kinda but not really did
> but i have too many notes and can't fiure them out.
>
> and even legacy shell stuff from xemacs days and such.
>
> emacs -Q says dumb for TERM for shell mode.  one issue with this i
> have a note saying is that colored output can silently corrupt cmd |
> grep if TERM=dumb.  or similr.  idr the details.  but i recall the
> problem and debugged it to the TERM variable.
>
> termprarily setting term to xterm fixed that problem but i have no
> idea where it is being set permanntly.
>

Setting TERM to xterm will fix the issue for some programs, but will
create a big problem when you run Emacs or GNU Screen in Shell mode.
By the way, you can use Coterm to enable full terminal emulation in
Shell mode.

> i can't actually figure out where in my shell code or elsewhere the
> following occurs: TERM gets set to xterm.  it works well or seems to
> but it might be WRONG on the internet.  and root vs. user and linux vt
> console might require special casing.
>
> -Q says supposed to be dumb, except i also recall emacs as a terminal
> type.  dunno where that came from.
>
> literally i have no shell code that sets the var althuogh it is used
> as a prefix to grep and such.  of course i am not asking you to intuit
> where the variable is being set but you might have interesting
> comments about TERM.

It's probably your init file that's responsible.  What does the user
option (variable) 'comint-terminfo-terminal' contain?

>
> example.  thisis probably bad code but it helps with grep
>
>     TERM=xterm \
>         LC_ALL=C grep -i --color=auto --devices=skip --directories=skip "$@"

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