+</PRE><H3><a name="h3-Standards">Standards</a></H3><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+ er, they are marked TO BE WITHDRAWN and may be removed in future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) as withdrawn.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.
+
+
+</PRE><H3><a name="h3-Compatibility-with-BSD-Termcap">Compatibility with BSD Termcap</a></H3><PRE>
+ 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.
+
+ The BSD termcap function <STRONG>tgetent</STRONG> returns the text of a termcap entry in
+ the buffer passed as an argument. This library (like other terminfo
+ implementations) does not store terminal descriptions as text. It sets
+ the buffer contents to a null-terminated string.
+
+
+</PRE><H3><a name="h3-Other-Compatibility">Other Compatibility</a></H3><PRE>
+ This library includes a termcap.h header, for compatibility with other
+ implementations. But the header is rarely used because the other im-
+ plementations are not strictly compatible.
+
+ The original BSD termcap (through 4.3BSD) had no header file which gave
+ function prototypes, because that was a feature of ANSI C. BSD termcap
+ was written several years before C was standardized. However, there
+ were two different termcap.h header files in the BSD sources:
+
+ <STRONG>o</STRONG> One was used internally by the <STRONG>jove</STRONG> editor in 2BSD through 4.4BSD.
+ It defined global symbols for the termcap variables which it used.
+
+ <STRONG>o</STRONG> The other appeared in 4.4BSD Lite Release 2 (mid-1993) as part of
+ <EM>libedit</EM> (also known as the <EM>editline</EM> library). The CSRG source his-
+ tory shows that this was added in mid-1992. The <EM>libedit</EM> header
+ file was used internally, as a convenience for compiling the <EM>edit-</EM>
+ <EM>line</EM> library. It declared function prototypes, but no global vari-
+ ables.
+
+ The header file from <EM>libedit</EM> was added to NetBSD's termcap library in
+ mid-1994.
+
+ Meanwhile, GNU termcap was under development, starting in 1990. The
+ first release (termcap 1.0) in 1991 included a termcap.h header. The
+ second release (termcap 1.1) in September 1992 modified the header to
+ use <STRONG>const</STRONG> for the function prototypes in the header where one would ex-
+ pect the parameters to be read-only. This was a difference versus the
+ original BSD termcap. The prototype for <STRONG>tputs</STRONG> also differed, but in
+ that instance, it was <EM>libedit</EM> which differed from BSD termcap.
+
+ A copy of GNU termcap 1.3 was bundled with <EM>bash</EM> in mid-1993, to support
+ the <STRONG>readline(3)</STRONG> library.
+
+ A termcap.h file was provided in ncurses 1.8.1 (November 1993). That
+ reflected influence by <STRONG>emacs(1)</STRONG> (rather than <STRONG>jove(1)</STRONG>) and GNU termcap:
+
+ <STRONG>o</STRONG> it provided declarations for a few global symbols used by <STRONG>emacs</STRONG>
+
+ <STRONG>o</STRONG> it provided function prototypes (using <STRONG>const</STRONG>).
+
+ <STRONG>o</STRONG> a prototype for <STRONG>tparam</STRONG> (a GNU termcap feature) was provided.
+
+ Later (in mid-1996) the <STRONG>tparam</STRONG> function was removed from ncurses. As a
+ result, there are differences between any of the four implementations,
+ which must be taken into account by programs which can work with all
+ termcap library interfaces.
+
+
+</PRE><H2><a name="h2-SEE-ALSO">SEE ALSO</a></H2><PRE>
+ <STRONG><A HREF="ncurses.3x.html">curses(3x)</A></STRONG>, <STRONG>putc(3)</STRONG>, <STRONG><A HREF="term_variables.3x.html">term_variables(3x)</A></STRONG>, <STRONG><A HREF="terminfo.5.html">terminfo(5)</A></STRONG>.