On Mon, 15 Jan 2001, Matt Herzog wrote:

> I have a firewall/sendmail box that does not run X11.
> When I login from my internal box that _does_ run X
> the terminal prints:
> Terminal type is xterm.
> 
> Can that be right? Is the shell really aware of the
> remote terminal or is the firewall/sendmail box 
> spawning an xterm on itself?

telnet sends the "terminal type name" to the server. And then the telnetd
sets the environment variable "TERM". The shell can be aware of this
remote terminal type -- and this can be quite useful. The firewall is not
spawing an xterm.

For example, I use the TERM environment variable in my .profile script for
setting terminal device options for when I log in using different
terminals.

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://www.reedmedia.net/