Introduction

The TERMINFO database describes terminal and printer capabilities. A wide range of capabilities can be defined that include, for example, the number of lines and columns for the device, whether or not the terminal wraps at the right margin, or what character sequence causes a carriage return. The database is used by screen-oriented programs such as VI or CURSES programs. By using TERMINFO to handle the capabilities of individual devices, a program can work with a variety of devices without any changes to the code.

The TERMINFO descriptions are located in the directory pointed to by the environment variable TERMINFO. The default directory is /usr/lib/terminfo.

	NOTE: There are several hundred terminal descriptions in the TERMINFO database. Hewlett-Packard only explicitly supports the following two terminal descriptions: hp2392a ansi The majority of terminals used by Hewlett-Packard customers are compatible with one of these two descriptions. The other descriptions are available for you to use, but they are not supported.