8.2.1 Introduction

The termcap library is an API to the termcap database which can be found in /etc/termcap/. The library functions allow the following actions:

• Get a description of the current terminal: tgetent(...).
• Search the description for information: tgetnum(...), tgetflag(...), tgetstr(...).
• Encode numeric parameters in a terminal specific form: tparam(...), tgoto(...).
• Compute and perform padding tputs(...).

Programs using the termcap library must include .h and should be linked with:

    gcc [flags] files -ltermcap

Termcap functions are terminal independent routines but only give the programmer low level access to the terminal. For a higher level package, curses or ncurses should be used.