- <STRONG>o</STRONG> tput writes to the standard output. That need not be
- a regular terminal.
-
- The AT&T implementation's <STRONG>init</STRONG> and <STRONG>reset</STRONG> commands use
- the <STRONG>tset</STRONG> source, which manipulates terminal modes. It
- successively tries standard output, standard error,
- standard input before falling back to "/dev/tty" and
- finally just assumes a 1200Bd terminal. When updating
- terminal modes, it ignores errors.
+ <STRONG>o</STRONG> <STRONG>tput</STRONG> <EM>capname</EM> writes to the standard output. That need
+ not be a regular terminal. However, the subcommands
+ which manipulate terminal modes may not use the stan-
+ dard output.
+
+ The AT&T implementation's <STRONG>init</STRONG> and <STRONG>reset</STRONG> commands use
+ the BSD (4.1c) <STRONG>tset</STRONG> source, which manipulates terminal
+ modes. It successively tries standard output, stan-
+ dard error, standard input before falling back to
+ "/dev/tty" and finally just assumes a 1200Bd terminal.
+ When updating terminal modes, it ignores errors.
+
+ Until changes made after ncurses 6.0, <STRONG>tput</STRONG> did not
+ modify terminal modes. <STRONG>tput</STRONG> now uses a similar
+ scheme, using functions shared with <STRONG>tset</STRONG> (and ulti-
+ mately based on the 4.4BSD <STRONG>tset</STRONG>). If it is not able
+ to open a terminal, e.g., when running in <STRONG>cron</STRONG>, <STRONG>tput</STRONG>
+ will return an error.