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.

About the Author

Linda Mui is an employee of O'Reilly and Associates. At ORA she has worked in system administration and user support, with a specialty in UNIX text processing tools. In addition, Linda has co-authored books on Termcap and Terminfo, Pick BASIC, and now the X Window System Administrator's Guide. Linda was born and raised in New York City. She currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her summer hobbies are lazing on her hammock, taking long aimless drives, and attempting to play tennis. Her winter hobbies are reading, cooking, and waiting for summer. John Strang now finds himself "a consumer--rather than a producer of Nutshells." He is currently a diagnostic radiologist (MD) at Stanford University. He is married to a pediatrician, Susie, and they have two children, Katie and Alex. John enjoys hiking, bicycling, and dabbling in other sciences. He plans to use his experience as an author at ORA to write his own book on radiology. Tim O'Reilly is founder and president of O'Reilly & Associates, publisher of the X Window System series and the popular Nutshell Handbooks(R) on UNIX. Tim has had a hand in writing or editing many of the books published by O'Reilly & Associates. He is also the author of a book about science-fiction writer Frank Herbert. Tim's long-term vision for the company is to create a vehicle where creative people can support themselves by exploring interesting ideas. Technical book publishing is just the first step. Tim graduated cum laude from Harvard in 1975 with a B.A. in Classics.

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