SBT Error: “Failed to construct terminal; falling back to unsupported…”

Question

I have run into an ERROR with SBT today. It can best be shown with the sbt sbt-version command:

Run on 5/29/17:

eric@linux-x2vq:~$ sbt s         


        

Answer 1

One year passed... now it happened to me.

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So, ncurses did change, and the corresponding sbt part was ...I guess... probably only implemented based on random guessed tests and observations/bugs and not any spec nor RFC. (So far, sbt is the only program with this ncurses issue that I know of.)

In case you can't simply upgrade sbt nor downgrade ncurses, you could change the TERM environment variable as mentioned in the other answers.

trivial fix:

If your sbt script is some bash script (most likely, unless you run DOS' .bat files)

$ file /usr/bin/sbt
/usr/bin/sbt: Bourne-Again shell script, ASCII text executable

, then it might suffice to add this workaround:

TERM="${TERM/xterm-256color/xterm-color}"