The -t switch causes PolyShell to present the user with the option of changing terminal types before proceeding with the session. It does this by first displaying the license banner and then asking the user to either confirm that it looks ok, or to specify a new terminal type. If a new type is specified, PolyShell changes the TERM environment variable to the new type, and then repeats the process until the user accepts the result. This can be a handy way to allow many users to share the same logon profile even though they have different terminal types.

Note that it is not possible to increase the length of your TERM environment variable definition. Thus, you can change it from "am62a" to "vt420", but not from "am62a" to "wyse50". Therefore, if you are using the –t switch, you should always start with a TERM setting whose length is at least a long as any of the other possibilities you are interested in. As a convenience along these lines, A-Shell will support "am62aa" as an alias to "am62a", and the standard am62a.tis TERMINFO definition we supply will as well.