WARNING: terminal is not fully functional

30 Jan 2015

Scenario: you ssh’d to a new machine and it gives you annoying warnings when you try to use things like man, less, or most any curses based application. The problem is that it does not know how to speak to your terminal. The fix is simple.

You need to provide a terminfo file from a machine that works without issues—likely whereever it was you are trying to ssh from—to a machine that gives you the warnings.

To create an terminfo file, use the command infocmp(1M).

infocmp >$TERM.info

This $TERM.info file can be copied to the other machine and installed using tic.

scp $TERM.info remote:$TERM.info
ssh remote tic -s $TERM.info

Now logging into ‘remote’ will hopefully allow curses applications to behave more nicely.