Terminal names are maintained as part of the shell environment in the environment variable TERM. See sh(1), profile(5), and environ(7). These names are used by certain commands (for example, tabs, tput, and vi) and certain functions (for example, see curses(3CURSES)).

Files under /usr/share/lib/terminfo are used to name terminals and describe their capabilities. These files are in the format described in terminfo(5). Entries in terminfo source files consist of a number of comma-separated fields. To print a description of a terminal term, use the command infocmp -I term. See infocmp(8). White space after each comma is ignored. The first line of each terminal description in the terminfo database gives the names by which terminfo knows the terminal, separated by bar (|) characters. The first name given is the most common abbreviation for the terminal (this is the one to use to set the environment variable TERMINFO in $HOME/.profile; see profile(5)), the last name given should be a long name fully identifying the terminal, and all others are understood as synonyms for the terminal name. All names but the last should contain no blanks and must be unique in the first 14 characters; the last name may contain blanks for readability.

Terminal names (except for the last, verbose entry) should be chosen using the following conventions. The particular piece of hardware making up the terminal should have a root name chosen, for example, for the AT&T 4425 terminal, att4425. This name should not contain hyphens, except that synonyms may be chosen that do not conflict with other names. Up to 8 characters, chosen from the set a through z and 0 through 9, make up a basic terminal name. Names should generally be based on original vendors rather than local distributors. A terminal acquired from one vendor should not have more than one distinct basic name. Terminal sub-models, operational modes that the hardware can be in, or user preferences should be indicated by appending a hyphen and an indicator of the mode. Thus, an AT&T 4425 terminal in 132 column mode is att4425-w. The following suffixes should be used where possible:

To avoid conflicts with the naming conventions used in describing the different modes of a terminal (for example, -w), it is recommended that a terminal's root name not contain hyphens. Further, it is good practice to make all terminal names used in the terminfo(5) database unique. Terminal entries that are present only for inclusion in other entries via the use= facilities should have a '+' in their name, as in 4415+nl.

Here are some of the known terminal names: (For a complete list, enter the command ls -C /usr/share/lib/terminfo/? ).

Commands whose behavior depends on the type of terminal should accept arguments of the form -Tterm where term is one of the names given above; if no such argument is present, such commands should obtain the terminal type from the environment variable TERM, which, in turn, should contain term.

sh (1), stty (1), tabs (1), tput (1), vi (1), curses (3CURSES), profile (5), terminfo (5), environ (7), infocmp (8)