FreeBSD tcsh and terminal window size

command-line-interfaceenvironment-variablesfreebsdterminal

When I'm working on my FreeBSD server's ssh, it always assume that terminal width is 80 columns. E.g. man pages show up in one thin column and all programs that use COLUMNS and LINES environment variables to guess terminal size work only in 80 default columns.

Are there any way to make tcsh correctly set this environment vars and send them to child programs?

Best Answer

sh: unset COLUMNS LINES; export TERM=xterm

csh: unsetenv COLUMNS LINES; setenv TERM xterm

Terminals which have dynamic size or font or resolution are the norm, not the exception.

When that became the case, Unix put this information into the kernel tty attributes, and deprecated $COLUMNS, $LINES, and the termcap/terminfo dimension data.

You can see the kernel dims by running "stty -a". Ssh, rlogin, and modern telnet pass these dimensions to the remote side.

Usually, unsetting elicits better behavior. Sometimes, a shell will reset the env vars (based on "stty" info).

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Add this to ~/.screenrc log out of screen and back in:

shell "/usr/bin/bash"
termcapinfo xterm* ti@:te@

Terminal window in Mac OS X

You can do this with shell profiles in Terminal.app.

Select the Terminal menu, go to Preferenes.
Select Settings from the buttons above.
Either select an existing profile or create a new one
In the Shell tab, check the Run Command box and enter cd $PROJECTDIR where $PROJECTDIR is the path to your project.
Check Run inside shell

Now from the New Window or New Tab menu when you create a window or tab with the profile you modified, it will execute the cd command inside your bash shell and change your directory to the one you want.

This is handy because you can create many different profiles for different tasks. If you want to run a large number of commands when starting up a profile, put then in file in ~/bin/ or somewhere else in your home directory and execute those instead. You can also use the semicolon ; to run multiple commands if you've checked the Run inside shell checkbox.

Best Answer

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Terminal window in Mac OS X

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