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How to get terminal width?

Donn Cave donn at u.washington.edu
Fri May 5 12:45:05 EDT 2000 
Quoth Bjorn Pettersen <bjorn at roguewave.com>:
| Paul Jackson wrote:
| > 
| > "stty size" isn't defined on my Irix box, but:
| > 
| >     tput cols
| > 
| > works on each of my Irix, SuSE and TurboLinux boxes,
| > issuing simply the number of columns.
|
| Well, we're getting closer :-)
|
| The above doesn't work on:
|
|  SunOS 4.1.4 (not present)
|  SunOS 5.4 (wrong result)
|
| But does work on:
|
|  RedHat 6.0
|  Solaris 2.6, 2.7 (7), 8
|  HPUX 10.20, 11
|  AIX 4.2, 4.3
|  IRIX64 6.2, 6.5
|  Dec 3.2

And it works on
  FreeBSD 4.0, and
  BeOS 4.5 and 5.0

However - "tput" is really mainly about terminal-specific information
retrieved from termcap/terminfo, and that shows in a couple of ways.
On BeOS, and I bet a few other platforms, I get "80" regardless of
my actual window size.  It can get the information from the terminal
description, and that's probably legitimate if not ideal.  Tput also
fails when the terminal type is unknown (a marginal problem, but could
be worse than you might think, if the platform suffers from the all
too common terminfo vs. termcap split.)  All this goes back to the
dark ages when we had real terminals, with more or less fixed screen sizes.

	Donn Cave, University Computing Services, University of Washington
	donn at u.washington.edu
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