Using terminfo

• Where termios gives you very low-level control over input processing, terminfo gives you a similar level of control over output processing.
• terminfo provides a portable, lowlevel interface to operations such as clearing a terminal screen, positioning the cursor, or deleting lines or characters (see man 5 terminfo).
• terminfo Capabilities; For each possible terminal type, such as VT100 or xterm, terminfo maintains a list of that terminal's capabilities and features, called a capname, or CAPability NAME. Capnames fall into one of the following categories:
  • boolean,
  • numeric,
  • string.
• The http://siber.cankaya.edu.tr/SystemsProgramming/cfiles/newgetcaps.c program in Fig. 12.4 shows how to query and print a few (and some additional) of the current terminal's capabilities.

  Figure 12.4: Puts the terminal in raw mode.