Re: Terminal type term-256color is not defined

[Bruno Haible]

Hi,

Jeffrey Walton wrote:
>    $ ssh 172.16.4.138
>    Last login: Sun Aug  9 23:39:18 2020 from 172.16.2.10
>    unknown terminal "xterm-256color"
>    unknown terminal "xterm-256color"

TERM, like LANG and a couple of other environment variables, are
passed through 'ssh'.

> and
> 
>     $ emacs test.txt
>     emacs: Terminal type term-256color is not defined.
> 
> There's one mention of xterm-256color in /etc
> 
>    # grep -IR xterm-256color /etc
>    /etc/termcap:#    * add xterm-88color and xterm-256color -TD
> 
> However, xterm-256color shows up frequently in /usr/local. I think the
> xterm-256color may be coming from libtextstyle.

libtextstyle does not set the TERM variable. However, you may have set
TERM=xterm-256color in order to get a more pleasant user experience with
libtextstyle-enabled programs [1].

As a workaround against what ssh does, you can, on the remote system,
modify the .bashrc to include statements like this:

case "$TERM" in
  xterm-256color)
    case `uname -n` in
      oldmachine1 | oldmachine2 )
        TERM=xterm ;;
    esac
    ;;
esac

Bruno

[1] 
https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/libtextstyle/manual/html_node/Terminal-emulators.html