The Curses extension to perl v5
Version 1.06
Copyright (c) 1994-2000 William Setzer
All rights reserved.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the same terms as perl, specifically:
a) the GNU General Public License as published by the Free
Software Foundation; either version 1, or (at your option) any
later version, or
b) the "Artistic License" which comes with this Kit.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
Artistic License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the Artistic License with this
Kit, in the file named "Artistic". If not, I'll be glad to provide one.
You should also have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation,
Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
This is a dynamic loadable curses module for perl. You can get this
package at any CPAN archive.
Please see the INSTALL document for how to install it on your system,
the Curses pod (located at the end of "Curses.pm") for known
incompatibilities with other Perl programs, and the end of this
document for known compile or install problems.
*** SECURITY NOTICE ***
It has always been the case with the curses functions, but please note
that the following functions:
getstr() (and optional wgetstr(), mvgetstr(), and mvwgetstr())
inchstr() (and optional winchstr(), mvinchstr(), and mvwinchstr())
instr() (and optional winstr(), mvinstr(), and mvwinstr())
are subject to buffer overflow attack. This is because you pass in
the buffer to be filled in, which has to be of finite length, but
there is no way to stop a bad guy from typing.
In order to avoid this problem, use the alternate functions:
getnstr()
inchnstr()
innstr()
which take an extra "size of buffer" argument.
New in 1.06:
o Now requires perl5.005 or better to run. (You can probably run it
in perl5.002-perl5.004 by grabbing newCONSTSUB out of the IO
distribution on CPAN and editing all uses of "foreach my $var" in
my perl scripts.)
o Did lots of fiddling with the file generation in an effort to make
it more comprehensible. In doing so, I moved around the way some
things were done and probably broke it on some systems with weird
compilers. Please let me know.
o changed the "Curses->new()" function to be a bit less clever.
o Support for libmenu! Many thanks to Yury Pshenichny <yura at zp.ua>
who did most of the actual work.
Update: Well, sort of support. For some reason beyond my ken, it
doesn't work with Solaris (2.6) libmenu. (The items won't attach to
the menu.) ncurses menu, both 1.9.9 and 5.2, seem to work fine.
o libform support added, too. Ho hum. ;) This one does appear to
work with Solaris libform.
o Added the following ncurses extension functions:
use_default_colors()
assume_default_colors()
define_key()
keybound()
keyok()
resizeterm()
(Thanks to neild at misago.org, hans at kolej.mff.cuni.cz)
o Re-enabled the functions:
attr_get()
attr_off()
attr_on()
attr_set()
o Between the functions supported and the functions listed in the
pod as not supported, those are all the ones I know about.
Got any more? Let me know.
o Fixed 64 bit issue with getch() and possibly others, truncating
returns of `chtype' to 32 bits. Note that this could possibly
break some OSes. Please let me know.
(Thanks to Randall.G.Steiner at bankofamerica.com)
o Fixed bug where @ARGV was always being cleared, and so no arguments
ever got to MakeMaker.
(Thanks to bdlow at nortelnetworks.com)
o Added hints for Darwin/Mac OS X system.
(Thanks to sdietrich at emlab.com)
o Added note to NETBSD users at the bottom of this README.
o Added a security notice to the README and pod.
(Thanks to connor at ing.umu.se)
o Has anyone successfully used the mouse event stuff?
The "demo" program is for demonstration purposes only. If it
references a function your version of curses doesn't have, wrap it in
an "eval" and try again. Same goes double for the "gdc" program.
You can type "make cdemo" to make a C language version of the demo.
If you get the same results via "demo" and "cdemo", but they don't
look right, then it's a bug in your libcurses, not in Curses.
* Personal Note *
I'm very grateful to all those that send in reports and patches, and
I'm very sorry that I don't release the Curses modules more often.
Yury's excellent libmenu patches have sat around for many months
because I've been too lazy to give Curses another round of polish.
Enjoy!
William Setzer
William_Setzer at ncsu.edu
Known Problems
--------------
NCurses
getch() and getstr() don't work right under very old versions of
ncurses (around v1.8.5). Please upgrade to a newer version.
panel_hidden() test is reversed in v1.9.9g. Please upgrade to
a newer version.
Actually, there are several problems in v1.9.9g. Please upgrade
to a newer version.
NETBSD
I continue to get conflicting reports about the correct number of
arguments for longname() and touchline(), controlled via the file
`hints/c-netbsd.h'. Before compiling, you may want to look them up
yourself, confirm them, and then editing `hints/c-netbsd.h'.
Any NETBSD guru that can resolve this problem for all versions of
their OS will get my undying gratitude.
Solaris 2.6
The menu stuff doesn't appear to work. I have no idea why.