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The Termcap Library

1.1 Preparing to Use the Termcap Library

To use the termcap library in a program, you need two kinds of preparation:

• The compiler needs declarations of the functions and variables in the library.

  On GNU systems, it suffices to include the header file `termcap.h' in each source file that uses these functions and variables.

  On Unix systems, there is often no such header file. Then you must explictly declare the variables as external. You can do likewise for the functions, or let them be implicitly declared and cast their values from type int to the appropriate type.

  We illustrate the declarations of the individual termcap library functions with ANSI C prototypes because they show how to pass the arguments. If you are not using the GNU C compiler, you probably cannot use function prototypes, so omit the argument types and names from your declarations.

• The linker needs to search the library. Usually either `-ltermcap' or `-ltermlib' as an argument when linking will do this.