Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!quintus!ok
From: ok@quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: TSET can speed up BSD UNIX
Message-ID: <412@quintus.UUCP>
Date: 16 Sep 88 04:47:22 GMT
References: <43200043@uicsrd.csrd.uiuc.edu>
Sender: news@quintus.UUCP
Reply-To: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Inc.
Lines: 21

In article <43200043@uicsrd.csrd.uiuc.edu> kai@uicsrd.csrd.uiuc.edu writes:
[recommending the use of `tset` to initialise TERM and TERMCAP, so that
 programs will run faster.]

This is _usually_ a good idea, but it is worth using the 'time' command
to see whether things have improved.  When I tried it here, the time to
use an editor went _UP_.

>From what I can tell, there is no way to store the TERMINFO information in
>the environment, meaning ls, vi, and other programs all have to go searching
>through the /usr/lib/terminfo directory for the terminal type each time I run
>a command.  ...  Is there something I am missing?

A little bit.  There is an environment variable TERMINFO which holds the
name of the directory, so if you want vt52 terminfo to come from
	/usr/kai/terminfo/v/vt52
you would do
	TERMINFO=/usr/kai/terminfo
The trouble is that a terminfo description is in binary, which means it
can have NUL characters, which means that putting one in the environment
isn't going to work.