-</PRE>
-<H3><a name="h3-TERMINFO">TERMINFO</a></H3><PRE>
- Overrides the directory in which <STRONG>ncurses</STRONG> searches for your
- terminal description. This is the simplest, but not the
- only way to change the list of directories. The complete
- list of directories in order follows:
+</PRE><H3><a name="h3-TERMINFO">TERMINFO</a></H3><PRE>
+ <STRONG>ncurses</STRONG> can be configured to read from multiple terminal
+ databases. The <STRONG>TERMINFO</STRONG> variable overrides the location
+ for the default terminal database. Terminal descriptions
+ (in terminal format) are stored in terminal databases:
+
+ <STRONG>o</STRONG> Normally these are stored in a directory tree, using
+ subdirectories named by the first letter of the termi-
+ nal names therein.
+
+ This is the scheme used in System V, which legacy Unix
+ systems use, and the <STRONG>TERMINFO</STRONG> variable is used by
+ <EM>curses</EM> applications on those systems to override the
+ default location of the terminal database.
+
+ <STRONG>o</STRONG> If <STRONG>ncurses</STRONG> is built to use hashed databases, then each
+ entry in this list may be the path of a hashed data-
+ base file, e.g.,
+
+ /usr/share/terminfo.db
+
+ rather than
+
+ /usr/share/terminfo/
+
+ The hashed database uses less disk-space and is a lit-
+ tle faster than the directory tree. However, some
+ applications assume the existence of the directory
+ tree, reading it directly rather than using the ter-
+ minfo library calls.
+
+ <STRONG>o</STRONG> If <STRONG>ncurses</STRONG> is built with a support for reading termcap
+ files directly, then an entry in this list may be the
+ path of a termcap file.