Customer Reviews

termcap & terminfo (O'Reilly Nutshell)

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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.

Several times, I see in news groups statements like how do I program keys in UNIX. Alternatively, I just changed my emulator and get funny characters. This book answers those questions and helps with the understanding of how to build a program that works with any terminal and other applications. Knowing this book can save person-days of speculation on why the control characters do not respond as you expected them to.