STORAGE LOCATION

Compiled terminfo descriptions are placed under the directory /etc/terminfo. Two configurations are supported (when building the ncurses libraries):

directory tree

A two-level scheme is used to avoid a linear search of a huge UNIX system directory: /etc/terminfo/c/name where name is the name of the terminal, and c is the first character of name. Thus, act4 can be found in the file /etc/terminfo/a/act4. Synonyms for the same terminal are implemented by multiple links to the same compiled file.

hashed database

Using Berkeley database, two types of records are stored: the terminfo data in the same format as stored in a directory tree with the terminfo's primary name as a key, and records containing only aliases pointing to the primary name.

If built to write hashed databases, ncurses can still read terminfo databases organized as a directory tree, but cannot write entries into the directory tree. It can write (or rewrite) entries in the hashed database.

ncurses distinguishes the two cases in the TERMINFO and TERMINFO_DIRS environment variable by assuming a directory tree for entries that correspond to an existing directory, and hashed database otherwise.

LEGACY STORAGE FORMAT

The format has been chosen so that it will be the same on all hardware. An 8 or more bit byte is assumed, but no assumptions about byte ordering or sign extension are made.

The compiled file is created with the tic program, and read by the routine setupterm(3X). The file is divided into six parts: the header, terminal names, boolean flags, numbers, strings, and string table.

The header section begins the file. This section contains six short integers in the format described below. These integers are

Short integers are stored in two 8-bit bytes. The first byte contains the least significant 8 bits of the value, and the second byte contains the most significant 8 bits. (Thus, the value represented is 256*second+first.) The value -1 is represented by the two bytes 0377, 0377; other negative values are illegal. This value generally means that the corresponding capability is missing from this terminal. Note that this format corresponds to the hardware of the VAX and PDP-11 (that is, little-endian machines). Machines where this does not correspond to the hardware must read the integers as two bytes and compute the little-endian value.

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 terminated with an ASCII NUL character.

The boolean flags have one byte for each flag. This byte is either 0 or 1 as the flag is present or absent. The capabilities are in the same order as 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 (this is a relic of the PDP-11's word-addressed architecture, originally designed in to avoid IOT traps induced by addressing a word on an odd byte boundary). All short integers are aligned on a short word boundary.

The numbers section is similar to the flags section. Each capability takes up two bytes, and is stored as a little-endian short integer. If the value represented is -1, the capability is taken to be missing.

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 ^X 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.

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.

EXTENDED STORAGE FORMAT

The previous section describes the conventional terminfo binary format. With some minor variations of the offsets (see PORTABILITY), the same binary format is used in all modern UNIX systems. Each system uses a predefined set of boolean, number or string capabilities.

The ncurses libraries and applications support extended terminfo binary format, allowing users to define capabilities which are loaded at runtime. This extension is made possible by using the fact that the other implementations stop reading the terminfo data when they have reached the end of the size given in the header. ncurses checks the size, and if it exceeds that due to the predefined data, continues to parse according to its own scheme.

First, it reads the extended header (5 short integers):

The count- and size-values for the extended string table include the extended capability names as well as extended capability values.

Using the counts and sizes, ncurses allocates arrays and reads data for the extended capabilities in the same order as the header information.

The extended string table contains values for string capabilities. After the end of these values, it contains the names for each of the extended capabilities in order, e.g., booleans, then numbers and finally strings.

Applications which manipulate terminal data can use the definitions described in term_variables(3X) which associate the long capability names with members of a TERMTYPE structure.

EXTENDED NUMBER FORMAT

On occasion, 16-bit signed integers are not large enough. With ncurses 6.1, a new format was introduced by making a few changes to the legacy format:

• a different magic number (0542)
• changing the type for the number array from signed 16-bit integers to signed 32-bit integers.

To maintain compatibility, the library presents the same data structures to direct users of the TERMTYPE structure as in previous formats. However, that cannot provide callers with the extended numbers. The library uses a similar but hidden data structure TERMTYPE2 to provide data for the terminfo functions.