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Well, I looked at /etc/termcap and noticed that there's a line that says it#8 somewhere for most terminals. I'm willing to bet that you could change that file with, say, perl: perl -pi.bak -e's/it#8/it#4/' /etc/termcap you'll have /etc/termcap.bak as a backup if this screws things up...
I dunno if that'll help or not, but it's possible. :)
'printenv TERM' says 'xterm'. However, when I change /etc/termcap as follows xterm|xterm terminal emulator (X Window System):\ :am:km:mi:ms:xn:\ :co#80:it#4:li#24:\ 'echo "a\tb"' still gives eight spaces for the tab instead of four. I think it's ignored in favor of terminfo. Anyway, changing system configuration files isn't ideal. This should be specific to a user (.profile or .cshrc), not specific to a machine.
I've been setting my terminal string to linux for a while now, and it works fine for most everything but a few older programs that don't get that "linux" is a color terminal. They just default to something like vt100 or similar.
I guess I can just use 'setenv TERM linux'. I had assumed I ended up with a default of 'xterm' for a reason. Thanks, -Robert Dick-