How to set TERM environment variable for linux shell

Question

I've got very odd problem when I set export TERM=xterm-256color in ~/.bash_profile. When I try to run nano or emacs I get the following errors.

nano:

.rror opening terminal: xterm-256color

emacs:

 is not defined.type xterm-256color
If that is not the actual type of terminal you have,
use the Bourne shell command `TERM=... export TERM' (C-shell:
`setenv TERM ...') to specify the correct type.  It may be necessary
to do `unset TERMINFO' (C-shell: `unsetenv TERMINFO') as well.

If I manually enter the following into the shell it works

export TERM=xterm-256color

I'm stumped.

Answer 1

Looks like you have DOS line feeds in your .bash_profile. Don't edit files on Windows, and/or use a proper tool to copy them to your Linux system.

^{Better yet, get rid of Windows.}

In more detail, you probably can't see it, but the erroneous line actually reads

export TERM=xterm-256color^M

where ^M is a literal DOS carriage return.

Like @EtanReisner mentions in a comment, you should not be hard-coding this value in your login files, anyway. Linux tries very hard to set it to a sane value depending on things like which terminal you are actually using and how you are connected. At most, you might want to override a particular value which the login process often chooses but which is not to your liking. Let's say you want to change to xterm-256color iff the value is xterm:

case $TERM in xterm) TERM=xterm-256color;; esac

This is not a programming question and yet an extremely common question on StackOverflow. Please google before asking.