3 Jan
2015
3 Jan
'15
1:13 a.m.
"terminfo" - that was the name I was reaching for and couldn't
quite remember (and google-fu failed me)!
The other BSD answer to the "searching /etc/termcap takes too long"
problem (and I recall it being noticeable on the heavily loaded
Cory Hall PDP-11/70 when you used a terminal whose entry was farther
from the top of the termcap file) was to put the termcap entry for
your terminal into the TERMCAP environment variable at login time,
which my .login does to this day - that puts it already in RAM,
ready to go, no banging on the disk required - you only pay for
the /etc/termcap (or, excuse me, /usr/share/misc/termcap in NetBSD
5 - it seems NetBSD 6 finally moved to a BSD-ified terminfo and I
should probably update my .login ...) search once.
Erik <fair(a)netbsd.org>