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Term::Cap

Term::Cap(3)           Perl Programmers Reference Guide           Term::Cap(3)



NAME
       Term::Cap - Perl termcap interface

SYNOPSIS
           require Term::Cap;
           $terminal = Tgetent Term::Cap { TERM => undef, OSPEED => $ospeed };
           $terminal->Trequire(qw/ce ku kd/);
           $terminal->Tgoto('cm', $col, $row, $FH);
           $terminal->Tputs('dl', $count, $FH);
           $terminal->Tpad($string, $count, $FH);

DESCRIPTION
       These are low-level functions to extract and use capabilities from a
       terminal capability (termcap) database.

       More information on the terminal capabilities will be found in the
       termcap manpage on most Unix-like systems.

       METHODS

           The output strings for Tputs are cached for counts of 1 for perfor-
           mance.  Tgoto and Tpad do not cache.  "$self->{_xx}" is the raw
           termcap data and "$self->{xx}" is the cached version.

               print $terminal->Tpad($self->{_xx}, 1);

           Tgoto, Tputs, and Tpad return the string and will also output the
           string to $FH if specified.

       Tgetent
           Returns a blessed object reference which the user can then use to
           send the control strings to the terminal using Tputs and Tgoto.

           The function extracts the entry of the specified terminal type TERM
           (defaults to the environment variable TERM) from the database.

           It will look in the environment for a TERMCAP variable.  If found,
           and the value does not begin with a slash, and the terminal type
           name is the same as the environment string TERM, the TERMCAP string
           is used instead of reading a termcap file.  If it does begin with a
           slash, the string is used as a path name of the termcap file to
           search.  If TERMCAP does not begin with a slash and name is differ-
           ent from TERM, Tgetent searches the files $HOME/.termcap,
           /etc/termcap, and /usr/share/misc/termcap, in that order, unless
           the environment variable TERMPATH exists, in which case it speci-
           fies a list of file pathnames (separated by spaces or colons) to be
           searched instead.  Whenever multiple files are searched and a tc
           field occurs in the requested entry, the entry it names must be
           found in the same file or one of the succeeding files.  If there is
           a ":tc=...:" in the TERMCAP environment variable string it will
           continue the search in the files as above.

           The extracted termcap entry is available in the object as
           "$self->{TERMCAP}".

           It takes a hash reference as an argument with two optional keys:

           OSPEED
             The terminal output bit rate (often mistakenly called the baud
             rate) for this terminal - if not set a warning will be generated
             and it will be defaulted to 9600.  OSPEED can be be specified as
             either a POSIX termios/SYSV termio speeds (where 9600 equals
             9600) or an old DSD-style speed ( where 13 equals 9600).

           TERM
             The terminal type whose termcap entry will be used - if not sup-
             plied it will default to $ENV{TERM}: if that is not set then Tge-
             tent will croak.

           It calls "croak" on failure.

       Tpad
           Outputs a literal string with appropriate padding for the current
           terminal.

           It takes three arguments:

           $string
             The literal string to be output.  If it starts with a number and
             an optional '*' then the padding will be increased by an amount
             relative to this number, if the '*' is present then this amount
             will me multiplied by $cnt.  This part of $string is removed
             before output/

           $cnt
             Will be used to modify the padding applied to string as described
             above.

           $FH
             An optional filehandle (or IO::Handle ) that output will be
             printed to.

           The padded $string is returned.

       Tputs
           Output the string for the given capability padded as appropriate
           without any parameter substitution.

           It takes three arguments:

           $cap
             The capability whose string is to be output.

           $cnt
             A count passed to Tpad to modify the padding applied to the out-
             put string.  If $cnt is zero or one then the resulting string
             will be cached.

           $FH
             An optional filehandle (or IO::Handle ) that output will be
             printed to.

           The appropriate string for the capability will be returned.

       Tgoto
           Tgoto decodes a cursor addressing string with the given parameters.

           There are four arguments:

           $cap
             The name of the capability to be output.

           $col
             The first value to be substituted in the output string ( usually
             the column in a cursor addressing capability )

           $row
             The second value to be substituted in the output string (usually
             the row in cursor addressing capabilities)

           $FH
             An optional filehandle (or IO::Handle ) to which the output
             string will be printed.

           Substitutions are made with $col and $row in the output string with
           the following sprintf() line formats:

            %%   output `%'
            %d   output value as in printf %d
            %2   output value as in printf %2d
            %3   output value as in printf %3d
            %.   output value as in printf %c
            %+x  add x to value, then do %.

            %>xy if value > x then add y, no output
            %r   reverse order of two parameters, no output
            %i   increment by one, no output
            %B   BCD (16*(value/10)) + (value%10), no output

            %n   exclusive-or all parameters with 0140 (Datamedia 2500)
            %D   Reverse coding (value - 2*(value%16)), no output (Delta Data)

           The output string will be returned.

       Trequire
           Takes a list of capabilities as an argument and will croak if one
           is not found.

EXAMPLES
           use Term::Cap;

           # Get terminal output speed
           require POSIX;
           my $termios = new POSIX::Termios;
           $termios->getattr;
           my $ospeed = $termios->getospeed;

           # Old-style ioctl code to get ospeed:
           #     require 'ioctl.pl';
           #     ioctl(TTY,$TIOCGETP,$sgtty);
           #     ($ispeed,$ospeed) = unpack('cc',$sgtty);

           # allocate and initialize a terminal structure
           $terminal = Tgetent Term::Cap { TERM => undef, OSPEED => $ospeed };

           # require certain capabilities to be available
           $terminal->Trequire(qw/ce ku kd/);

           # Output Routines, if $FH is undefined these just return the string

           # Tgoto does the % expansion stuff with the given args
           $terminal->Tgoto('cm', $col, $row, $FH);

           # Tputs doesn't do any % expansion.
           $terminal->Tputs('dl', $count = 1, $FH);

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
       Please see the README file in distribution.

AUTHOR
       This module is part of the core Perl distribution and is also main-
       tained for CPAN by Jonathan Stowe <jns@gellyfish.com>.

SEE ALSO
       termcap(5)



perl v5.8.6                       2001-09-21                      Term::Cap(3)