While reading this OSNews thread on FreeBSD, I learned of the portsman tool. It's a curses-based front end to the FreeBSD ports tree. It offers similar functionality to portupgrade but through a menu system. I found it interesting that it was hosted at berlios and not at SourceForge like most open source projects.

One adjustment I made to use portsman was to change the default TERM value from 'xterm' to 'xterm-color' so I could see the menu better in an SSH session using root's default csh (actually tcsh) shell. Just edit the .cshrc value in root's home directory and then execute 'source .cshrc' to change the variable. To only change the TERM variable for the session, execute

setenv TERM xterm-color

It's different for sh or bash. There, run

TERM=xterm-color
export TERM

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