Termcap database issues

Hello. I'm running 13.1-RELEASE. Last night I was trying to enable colors for my Windows client (PuTTY) and when trying to run anything, I got the message about putty-256color not being a valid terminal. So I tried adding it to /etc/termcap and running cap_mkdb, and after that, my system is ruined.

Pretty much every program I want to run (over ssh) says it can't access the termcap database. For example, zsh says:

Code:
Cannot read termcap database;
using dumb terminal settings.

bash, csh, and others say similar messages.

echo $TERM says "xterm"

I tried the following:

  • removed the putty-256color entry
  • ran cap_mkdb /etc/termcap
  • deleted /etc/termcap.db
  • cd /usr/local/share/misc && cap_mkdb termcap
  • chmod 666 termcap*
  • cd /usr/src/share/termcap && make install
  • recreated the link from /usr/local/share/misc/termcap to /etc/termcap
  • installing ncurses
  • uninstalling ncurses
  • installing screen, tmux, bash, zsh, csh to see if they try to cap_mkdb properly
I'm not really sure what the problem is
 
There is no TERM line in any of my rc files, or in .profile, but still, this sounds like it'll just treat the symptom but not fix the problem?

This system worked like this for over 10 years.
 
do you have a TERMCAP or TERMPATH entry in your env ?
I didn't have one but when googling for info on that I noticed that by default it will search for ~/termcap, /etc/termcap, and /usr/share/misc/termcap

The problem is that I had a bad ~/termcap.db. I deleted it and it all works now!
 
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