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 performance. 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 different 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 specifies 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:
Tpad: Outputs a literal string with appropriate padding for the current terminal.; It takes three arguments:
Tputs: Output the string for the given capability padded as appropriate without any parameter substitution.; It takes three arguments:
Tgoto: Tgoto decodes a cursor addressing string with the given parameters.; There are four arguments:
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 maintained for CPAN by Jonathan Stowe <jns@gellyfish.com>.