TERM and shell mode

[Samuel Wales <samologist@gmail.com>]

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.

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.

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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