cygwin: WARNING: terminal is not fully functional

Published on January 7, 2009 in geek stuffs. 173 Comments Tags: , , , .

I recently encoun­tered an error where when I do a less in cygwin it goes WARNING: terminal is not fully functional Quite some people seem to have encoun­tered this prob­lem before and there are some dis­cus­sion threads on the Web, but I couldn’t find a page that pointed out the direct solu­tion after some googling. Here’s what I did to fix the prob­lem: It turns out that the envi­ron­ment vari­able TERM is some­how set to dumb instead of the normal cygwin. Appar­ently the dumb ter­mi­nal is not as fully func­tional as cygwin. Here’s what I did to con­firm the prob­lem: $ echo $TERM dumb I got less work­ing prop­erly again by doing: $ export TERM=cygwin $ less It turned out that some­how the $TERM envi­ron­ment vari­able got set to dumb. To fix that, simply run sysdm.cpl from a Win­dows com­mand prompt, and delete the envi­ron­ment vari­able TERM. cygwin will then default TERM to cygwin

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