dbae:

The previous posters are correct. Having said that, you might look at your shell initialization script: I'm guessing that it's setting your TERM variable to something incompatible with your command console. Many *nix programs will read the TERM variable to determine what features it can use to format your output better. However, if it's set to something incompatible with your terminal program, you'll get exactly the situation you describe. Be sure to check that your terminal software has enough features, too. If you want color, boldface, underlines, etc., be sure you use a program that handles it.

The documentation for your terminal software should tell you enough information to figure out what the correct TERM value should be. (Though it may be overly cryptic, or not stated directly enough.) For example, the terminal I'm using here at work is mintty, and in the documentation it mentions:

Terminal emulation settings.

Type (Term=xterm)

The terminal type. This determines the setting of the TERM environment variable at mintty startup. Choices available from the dropdown list are xterm, xterm-256color, xterm-vt220, vt220, and vt100.

If the setting contains "vt220", xterm VT220-style function key mode is enabled instead of the default PC-style function key mode. (This can otherwise be set with the DECSET 1061 control sequence.)

Apart from that, this setting has no effect on mintty's terminal emulation, i.e. all the features are always available. However, the TERM setting does tell applications what features they can use.

The xterm-256color setting enables 256-color mode in some applications, but may not be recognised at all by others, which is why plain xterm is the default.

So on my setup, I'm using TERM=xterm (I would have added it to my .bashrc script, except that mintty defaults to setting the value for me.)

...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.