Running a Condor (7.5.5) job for my c++ program which makes use of the ncurses library, I got an error:

Error opening terminal: unknown.

I found a related question on Stack Overflow. Adding a TERM environment variable turned out to be the solution. To do this in Condor, add a line like this to your Condor script:

environment    = "TERM=xterm"

If you want to add more variables, just use a space to separate them inside the quotation marks.