[ILUG] termcap etc.

[Niall O Broin]

On Thu, Oct 25, 2001 at 10:27:12AM +0100, John P. Looney wrote:

>  What is the termcap file used for these days ?

That's a good question - man termcap says that the various tget routines 

are included as a conversion aid for pro­ grams that use the termcap
library. Their parameters are the same and the routines are emulated using
the terminfo database.  Thus, they can only be used to query the capa­
bilities of entries for which a terminfo entry has been compiled.

so it would see that /etc/termcap is redundant. I daresay it's left because
there are some braindead programs which looked at the file rather than using
the provided access functions. However, on this SuSE 7.2 box doing an
ls -lu /usr/share/misc/termcap (to which /etc/termcap is a symlink) shows
that the files has not been accessed since the OS was installed though that
would only mean that I've never used the relevant flaky programs.

Just had a look on a BBC which is essentially Debian based. Terminfo is in
/etc/terminfo there and there are only a couple of entries but there's an
800k /etc/termcap which IS used - set TERM to something unknown, try to do
clear, get a tput error about "unknown terminal type" and observe with ls
-lu that /etc/termcap has been consulted. So, if you're trying to slim down
a Linux for an embedded system, the terminfo database and the termcap file
are definitely candidates for Unislim, but you'd better test your apps.



Niall