Rebeling computer: DEL and backspace

Debian for a long time tried to have their own xterm type ‘xterm-debain’. In order to work around some problem I was having some point in the past (the oldest dotfile I have in my home directory is dated “Jan 27 1997”) I created a my personal xterm terminfo file that had some bug fix.

Fast forward to present day: I’ve upgraded to gnome 2.4, bringing with it many other updates, and suddenly bash is printing “~” when I hit DEL and joe is DEL’ing when I backspace.

This drives me nuts trying to compare the setup on that machine with all the other well behaving debian boxes I have. Finally I ran strace

[...]
access("/home/myers/.terminfo/x/xterm", R_OK) = 0
open("/home/myers/.terminfo/x/xterm", O_RDONLY) = 3
[...]

Lessions learned:

• strace is the greatest
• It might be nice to start with a clean $HOME every so often