HP-UX Reference (11i v2 04/09) - 4 File Formats (vol 8)

t
term(4) term(4)
NAME
term - format of compiled term file
SYNOPSIS
term
DESCRIPTION
Compiled terminfo descriptions are placed under the directory
/usr/share/lib/terminfo
. In order
to avoid a linear search of a huge HP-UX system directory, a two-level scheme is used:
/usr/share/lib/terminfo/
c
/name where name is the name of the terminal, and c is the first
character of name. Thus,
hp110 can be found in the file
/usr/share/lib/terminfo/h/hp110
.
Synonyms for the same terminal are implemented by multiple links to the same compiled file.
The format has been chosen so that it is the same on all hardware. An 8-bit or longer byte is assumed,
but no assumptions about byte ordering or sign extension are made.
The compiled file is created using the
tic program (see tic (1M)), and read by the setupterm() rou-
tine. The file is divided into the following six parts:
1. The header section begins the file and contains six short integers in the following format:
1. Magic number (octal 0432);
2. Size, in bytes, of the names section;
3. Number of bytes in the Boolean section;
4. Number of short integers in the numbers section;
5. Number of offsets (short integers) in the strings section;
6. Size, in bytes, of the string table.
Short integers are stored in two 8-bit bytes. The first byte contains the least significant 8 bits
of the value; the second byte contains the most significant 8 bits. (Thus, the value represented
is 256 ∗ second + first.) The value −1 is represented by 0377, 0377; other negative values are
illegal. The −1 generally means that a capability is missing from this terminal. Note that this
format corresponds to the hardware of the VAX and PDP-11. Machines where this does not
correspond to the hardware read the integers as two bytes and compute the result.
2. The terminal names section comes next. It contains the first line of the terminfo description,
listing the various names for the terminal, separated by the
| character. The section is ter-
minated with an ASCII NUL character.
3. In the Boolean section, the Boolean flags have one byte for each flag. This byte is either
0 or
1 as the flag is absent or present, respectively. The capabilities are in the same order as they
are listed in the file <term.h>.
Between the Boolean section and the number section, a null byte will be inserted, if necessary,
to ensure that the number section begins on an even byte. All short integers are aligned on a
short word boundary.
4. The numbers section is similar to the flags section. Each capability consists of two bytes, and
is stored as a short integer. If the value represented is −1, the capability is considered miss-
ing.
5. The strings section is also similar. Each capability is stored as a short integer in the format
above. A value of −1 means the capability is missing. Otherwise, the value is taken as an
offset from the beginning of the string table. Special characters in ˆX or \c notation are stored
in their interpreted form, not the printing representation. Padding information $nn and
parameter information %x are stored intact in uninterpreted form.
6. The final section is the string table. It contains all the values of string capabilities referenced
in the string section. Each string is null terminated.
Note that it is possible for
setupterm() to expect a different set of capabilities than are actually
present in the file. Either the database might have been updated since setupterm() has been recom-
piled (resulting in extra unrecognized entries in the file) or the program may have been recompiled more
recently than the database was updated (resulting in missing entries). The routine setupterm() must
be prepared for both possibilities, which is why the numbers and sizes are included. Also, new capabili-
ties must always be added at the end of the lists of Boolean, number, and string capabilities.
The following example is an octal dump of the description for the HP Portable Computer (HP-110):
HP-UX 11i Version 2: September 2004 − 1 − Hewlett-Packard Company Section 4−−323