termcap & terminfo (O'Reilly Nutshell)
While termcap and terminfo are no longer as important as they once were, due to the growth of the X terminal market and increased standardization among ASCII terminals, handling different terminal types can still be a headache for system administrators. The termcap and terminfo databases are UNIX's solution to the difficulty of supporting many terminals without writing special drivers for each terminal. Termcap (BSD) and terminfo (System V) describe the features of hundreds of terminals, together with a library of routines that allow programs to use those capabilities.This book documents hundreds of capabilities and syntax for termcap and terminfo, writing and debugging terminal descriptions, and terminal initialization.Contents include: Terminal independence: the need for termcap and terminfo. Reading termcap and terminfo entries. Capability syntax. Initializing the terminal environment. Writing termcap and terminfo entries. Converting between termcap and terminfo. Detailed descriptions of the capabilities. Screen dimensions and cursor movement. Initialization and reset. Special and equivalent terminals. Many useful appendices.
Format:Paperback
Language:English
ISBN:0937175226
ISBN13:9780937175224
Release Date:May 1988
Publisher:O'Reilly Media
Length:264 Pages
Weight:0.90 lbs.
Dimensions:0.6" x 5.6" x 8.5"
Customer Reviews
1 rating
Tresaure for unix geeks
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 16 years ago
This is a very usefull book for everybody who wants to understand how terminals in unix and linux work. Hardware terminals are not used widely now, but console and telnet/ssh are terminals too (it is called "virtual terminal"), and you need to know how to configure it for example for localization process. Although this book was written 20 years ago it is still actual becase BSD and System V terminal engine did not change alot. It helps you with reading pretty cryptic data from termcap and terminfo files (mans are not enought here:( ), creating new entries from scratch, configuring shells to work correctly and understanding how pseudo-graphics (like curses and ncurses) works.
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