+</PRE><H2><a name="h2-PORTABILITY">PORTABILITY</a></H2><PRE>
+ These functions are provided for supporting legacy applications, and
+ should not be used in new programs:
+
+ <STRONG>o</STRONG> The XSI Curses standard, Issue 4 describes these functions. Howev-
+ er, they are marked TO BE WITHDRAWN and may be removed in future
+ versions.
+
+ <STRONG>o</STRONG> X/Open Curses, Issue 5 (December 2007) marked the termcap interface
+ (along with <STRONG>vwprintw</STRONG> and <STRONG>vwscanw</STRONG>) as withdrawn.
+
+ Neither the XSI Curses standard nor the SVr4 man pages documented the
+ return values of <STRONG>tgetent</STRONG> correctly, though all three were in fact re-
+ turned ever since SVr1. In particular, an omission in the XSI Curses
+ documentation has been misinterpreted to mean that <STRONG>tgetent</STRONG> returns <STRONG>OK</STRONG>
+ or <STRONG>ERR</STRONG>. Because the purpose of these functions is to provide compati-
+ bility with the <EM>termcap</EM> library, that is a defect in XCurses, Issue 4,
+ Version 2 rather than in ncurses.
+
+ External variables are provided for support of certain termcap applica-
+ tions. However, termcap applications' use of those variables is poorly
+ documented, e.g., not distinguishing between input and output. In par-
+ ticular, some applications are reported to declare and/or modify <STRONG>os-</STRONG>
+ <STRONG>peed</STRONG>.
+
+ The comment that only the first two characters of the <STRONG>id</STRONG> parameter are
+ used escapes many application developers. The original BSD 4.2 termcap
+ library (and historical relics thereof) did not require a trailing null
+ NUL on the parameter name passed to <STRONG>tgetstr</STRONG>, <STRONG>tgetnum</STRONG> and <STRONG>tgetflag</STRONG>.
+ Some applications assume that the termcap interface does not require
+ the trailing NUL for the parameter name. Taking into account these is-
+ sues:
+
+ <STRONG>o</STRONG> As a special case, <STRONG>tgetflag</STRONG> matched against a single-character
+ identifier provided that was at the end of the terminal descrip-
+ tion. You should not rely upon this behavior in portable programs.
+ This implementation disallows matches against single-character ca-
+ pability names.
+
+ <STRONG>o</STRONG> This implementation disallows matches by the termcap interface
+ against extended capability names which are longer than two charac-
+ ters.
+
+
+</PRE><H2><a name="h2-SEE-ALSO">SEE ALSO</a></H2><PRE>
+ <STRONG><A HREF="ncurses.3x.html">curses(3x)</A></STRONG>, <STRONG><A HREF="terminfo.5.html">terminfo(5)</A></STRONG>, <STRONG><A HREF="term_variables.3x.html">term_variables(3x)</A></STRONG>, <STRONG>putc(3)</STRONG>.