PuTTY - Stack variables not updating on null line

2

This is going to be a bit of an odd issue to explain. I'm fairly new to terminal communication as well, being that it is way before my time, so if I mess up any terminology I apologize in advance.

I'm trying to use PuTTY as a standard telnet application, similar to the SmarTerm 420 program (if anyone has ever used it) in order to access our AIX server (PuTTY is my intended 64-bit replacement for that old 16-bit application).

Everything communicates just fine, except for one small detail. Whenever there is a stack of sorts, or a page change where say, only some of the fields on the page are modified, any record whose line would normally be replaced with a blank line (no data or end of stack), the data from the previous page remains visually present.

Let me give an example of this. If we flip through our spooler on PuTTY, we will say there is...8 items and there are 5 items per page. In PuTTY, it would appear as follows:

(first page)

Item 1
Item 2
Item 3
Item 4
Item 5

N for next

(second page)

Item 6
Item 7
Item 8
Item 4
Item 5

End of list

The data in these fields seems to be residual. It will happen if we go forward or backward through pages or records. If there is a blank field or record in the next page, it will not refresh the field to display nothing, but simply leave the previous text.

Is anyone familiar with this issue? Is there a setting I'm missing? If there's any more information I can give, please let me know. Thanks!

JesterXIII

Posted 2013-10-15T15:54:29.570

Reputation: 21

Answers

0

The most likely fix is to set the $TERM variable in AIX to xterm or possibly xterm-color.

PuTTY emulates the xterm terminal, which means it responds to the control codes being sent to it by the AIX server. These control codes tell it to do things like change the font color, move the cursor around, or clear the screen.

Each type of terminal uses its own different codes for these things, so the AIX server needs a way to know which terminal it is controlling. Otherwise it might send the wrong code when it wants to clear the screen, and you could get this kind of problem that you have.

Most programs will check the $TERM variable to decide which kind of control characters to send.

Kevin Panko

Posted 2013-10-15T15:54:29.570

Reputation: 6 339

Thanks, this is definitely pointing me in a direction I didn't even think of. I'm trying to use the export $TERM=xterm command, and it does change $TERM, however, it doesn't seem to have much of an affect on the issue.

I kept digging a little further, and I found that /usr/share/lib/terminfo/x/xterm exists, however, there's no corresponding xterm.ti in /usr/share/lib/terminfo. From what I understand, I need to compile the xterm.ti using a tic command? – JesterXIII – 2013-10-16T19:20:33.013

In my experience on Linux, there is no need to ever use tic because the terminfo files come already compiled, and you never need to change them. – Kevin Panko – 2013-10-16T19:34:58.817

Asked: 2013-10-15T15:54:29.570

Viewed: 100 times

Active: 2013-10-15T16:29:36.077