General guidance needed; 'terminfo' and other special class of commands

[Kevin O'Gorman]

You could do worse than starting at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminfo

Terminfo refers to both a library and a database that it uses.  It and it's
predecessor termcap have existed since 1978, and still exist in every
flavor of *nix systems I've ever seen,  They tried to solve the problem
posed by the wide variety of early terminals, especially display terminals,
and the similar variety of capabilities and the control character sequences
to invoke them.

They are used primarily in console-mode programs that want cursor placement
or special effects.  This would include programs like vim(1), some of the
games in the bsdgames package, and similar programs.  Many such programs do
not access terminfo directly, but use the curses library, or one of its
forks.  My xubuntu system has libncurses5.



On Sun, May 25, 2014 at 8:09 AM, Sabniveesu Shashank <shashank at linux.com>wrote:

> Hi!
>
> Today I came across some discussion to discover 'terminfo'. After a few
> attempts I see terminfo is not a command yet a man page exists for it. This
> raised a few questions:
>
> 1) What class does this 'terminfo' belong to and how many such exist?
> 2) Are they bash-specific or GNU-specific or what at all is their scope?
> 3) Are they called 'classes' or is there a term for them?
> 4) Is there a definitive place I can learn about them?
>
> Thanks
>
>
> S.V.R.S.N. Shashank
> about.me/shashank.computers
>     <http://about.me/shashank.computers>
>
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-- 
Kevin O'Gorman

programmer, n. an organism that transmutes caffeine into software.
Please consider the environment before printing this email.
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