
\S terminal type \S

A terminal type is a name and/or number that designates the manufacturer
and model of a terminal.  Terminal type is important for the operating
system when it is sending you information, and it is also important when
you use text formatting commands.

The shell must know what type of terminal you are working on so that the
information it sends you prints nicely on your terminal.  The shell finds
out what your terminal type is when you assign a value to the $TERM
variable. When you login, your ".profile"\S*\S program asks you which
type of terminal you are using.  If you are working on a TELETYPE 5620
Dot-Mapped Display terminal, you could type 5620 or dmd and the system
would interpret it correctly.  You can get a list of valid terminal types
from the /usr/lib/terminfo directory, or from the manual page for term(5).

Terminal type is also important when you are formatting text with commands
like nroff(1).  These text formatting commands have options that take a
terminal type as an argument.  By specifying the terminal where you will
have the text printed, you will be sure that the text prints correctly.
The valid terminal types are different for each text formatting command,
and you can get a list of the valid types on the "manual pages"\S*\S for
each command.

\S*\S defined in the \Sglossary\S
