What's the right value of $TERM for emacs' ansi-term, especially if 'eterm-color' isn't available after SSH?

I'm currently setting $TERM to xterm-256color: if [[ -n "$EMACS" ]]; then export TERM=xterm-256color alias emacs="emacsclient --no-wait" export EDITOR="emacsclient --no-wait" export VISUAL="emacsclient" fi I used to have it set to eterm-color, but the problem is that this terminal type is not available on most of the machines I log into via SSH. The default .bashrc in Ubuntu checks if the TERM variable starts with xterm-, in which case it tries to set the window title: PS1="\[\e]0;${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h: \w\a\]$PS1" The problem is the \[\e]0; bit. It should be parsed by xterm-compatible terminal emulators, but emacs (ansi-term) doesn't do that. The result of which is a terminal like this: 0;user@host: ~user@host:~$ It also breaks some applications using readline, when the typed text is larger than the width of the terminal. Because eterm-color isn't available on some remote hosts (and I can't install it either), setting it to that value messes up things like less. Is there any trick I can use, such as another terminal type that ships with most distributions or a hack that makes ansi-term recognize the relevant escape codes and set the title, or just discard them?