Trying to SSH in using urxvt gives error

Question

Every other terminal I've tried has worked fine and has displayed colours and such correctly, but whenever I log in using urxvt I get the following error

tput: unknown terminal "rxvt-unicode-256color"
tput: unknown terminal "rxvt-unicode-256color"
tput: unknown terminal "rxvt-unicode-256color"

Whenever I try to clear I get the following error

'rxvt-unicode-256color': unknown terminal type.

And some programs such as nano won't start at all, giving this error

Error opening terminal: rxvt-unicode-256color.

Answer 1

Try:

export TERM=xterm-256color 

I'd guess that rxvt provides a superset of xterm capabilities, so this should be okay, and will be recognized by tput. It only applies to the current shell and its children, so if it causes a problem you can just close it.

If it works you can add it to ~/.profile so you do not have to keep doing it over again -- although note that this requires you log in again and in some contexts may not work, you can check easily with echo $TERM.

Answer 2

TERMINFO

Install the appropriate entry into the terminfo database

According to the ArchLinux Wiki

If you are logging into a remote host, you may encounter problems when running text-mode programs under rxvt-unicode. This can be fixed by installing rxvt-unicode-terminfo on the remote host or by copying /usr/share/terminfo/r/rxvt-unicode from your local machine to your host at ~/.terminfo/r/rxvt-unicode; same for rxvt-unicode-256color.

As goldilocks noted in their answer. It is very likely that urxvt has sufficient in common with xterm that it can use an xterm terminfo entry mostly OK.