“...I've been working since 2008 with Ruby / Ruby on Rails, love a bit of Elixir / Phoenix and learning Rust. I also poke through other people's code and make PRs for OpenSource Ruby projects that sometimes make it. Currently working for InPay who are based in Denmark...”

Rob Lacey
Senior Software Engineer, UK

xterm-256color: unknown terminal type

Trying to run `top` on an Ubuntu server from OSX Mountain Lion results in the following.

root@server:~# top
'xterm-256color': unknown terminal type.

Thanks to Corentin Leclerc for the solution http://blog.corentinleclerc.com/terminal-sur-macos-x-lion-xterm-256color-unkn

Add the following to ~/.profile or ~/.bash_profile

export TERM="xterm"

Restart your terminal, or open a new tab. Magic.

root@server:~# top

top - 10:52:46 up 31 days, 16:34,  1 user,  load average: 0.04, 0.02, 0.00
Tasks:  57 total,   1 running,  56 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  0.0%us,  0.0%sy,  0.0%ni,100.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:    786652k total,   772360k used,    14292k free,   181920k buffers
Swap:        0k total,        0k used,        0k free,    46000k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                                                                                                                                                                              
26479 rails     20   0 89604  57m 2428 S  0.3  7.5   0:04.08 ruby1.8                                                                                                                                                                                               
    1 root      20   0  1952  508   72 S  0.0  0.1   0:13.04 init                                                                                                                                                                                                  
    2 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.12 kthreadd