When COBOL provides formatted field input and output on the terminal, it carries out some sophisticated screen handling compared to many UNIX applications. Certain terminal capabilities must be available and described in the terminfo entry referenced by TERM otherwise the run-time system gives a run-time error.
Your COBOL system tries to optimize the use of the terminal and uses some optional terminal capabilities if they are described in terminfo. Required and optional terminal terminfo details are described in this section.