Date: Sun, 12 Oct 1997 14:19:19 +0200 (IST)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To: ph DOT tan AT bj DOT col DOT co DOT cn
cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: Can't run emacs under bash!
In-Reply-To: <343ed8475f67002@bj.col.com.cn>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.971012141852.8447P-100000@is>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Precedence: bulk


On Sat, 11 Oct 1997 ph DOT tan AT bj DOT col DOT co DOT cn wrote:

> Emacs 19.34 runs perfectly at DOS prompt, but under bash , it 
> refuses to run by giving the following complaint:
> 
> emacs: Cannot open termcap database file.

You have an old version of the Bash port which defines the TERM
environment variable.  Emacs tries to use the value of that variable,
if defined, to load the Terminal Capabilities (aka termcap) database
for the named terminal, and fails, since most DOS systems don't have
such a data base.

The solution is to undefine TERM before running Emacs, or set it to
"internal" (without the quotes).  Emacs will then use its internal
terminal emulator, which is how it is supposed to work on DOS.

You can set TERM=internal in the [emacs] section of your DJGPP.ENV
file, so this setting is only visible by Emacs.

A better solution would be to install the latest port of Bash, which
doesn't define TERM at all.