Reading termcap database other than termcap

[Simon J Gerraty]

In <WAYNE.90Nov26180444 at forchammer.cs.odu.edu> wayne at cs.odu.edu (C Wayne Huling) writes:
>  I have written a small program to accept the name of a printer and search
>the printcap for the hostmachine.  I use the termcap routines supplied in the
>Unix PRM.  Unfortunatly it reads from a environment set variable.  My problem
>is if I set this variable "TERM" to be /etc/printcap and then run another
>program that needs "TERM" to be /etc/termcap then it will bomb.  Is there any
>way of setting the file to be read from internally?

I could not find any clean method of using the termcap routines
to handle files like /etc/printcap.  I ran into the same problem
that you have while writing a daemon to service remote printers
attached to terminal servers.  After some mucking about, I wrote
a simple library module to mimic (as far as I can tell) the
termcap routines but providing a more generalised mechanism.

Here is an extract:

/* NAME:
 *      cap.c - facility like termcap
 *
 * SYNOPSIS:
 *      int cap_getent(char *buf, char *name);
 *      int cap_getnum(char *id);
 *      int cap_getflag(char *id);
 *      char *cap_getstr(char *id, char **area);
 *
 * DESCRIPTION:
 *      This module provides a general analogy to the TERMCAP facility.
 *      If the variable _cap_database is not set, cap behaves like termcap.

It handles things like following tc=like entries.  If the "like"
entry is in the same file it is simply absorbed into the entity
being retrieved, otherwise the tc=like entry is left at the end.

The source is about 4k.  Let me know if you want a copy.
-- 
Simon J. Gerraty		<sjg at melb.bull.oz.au>

#include <disclaimer,_witty_comment>