Where can I find TTY and curses documentation for Unix?

Question

I'm working on automation tools for an ERP program running on SCO Unix.
See my questions on Expect:

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1987302/tcl-expect-clear-screen-after-exit
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1988811/expect-get-variable-from-screen-region-based-on-row-and-column

Where can I find (either locally or on the web) resources for understanding what control characters are used in a session, and more specifically, determining a field location on the screen during an interaction with the ERP program?

Answer 1

I'm not really clear what you are asking, but one source of documentation on curses is the GNU implementation at http://www.gnu.org/software/ncurses. As far as 'control characters' go, well that depends on what terminal you use - yours probably understands ANSI codes - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code.

Answer 2

The specific control characters for a given terminal type are stored in the terminfo database. curses reads the value of $TERM when initializing and uses it to find and extract the relevant sequences for the various terminal operations.

Answer 3

I just found out that the X/Open Group released a new version of their standard in November 2009 (previous version was released in 1996), and it is available free on the web from their bookstore as Technical Standard - X/Open Curses, Issue 7. You have to register, but access is free (and registration does not lead to an inundation of email, etc).

The previous version, Issue 4, Version 2 (from July 1996), is no longer available from X/Open. Given the newness of Issue 7, the new features are unlikely to be widely implemented yet, but look for changes in the next few years.