Status line entries in termcap

[wagner at uw-june.UUCP]

In article <1004 at dcl-cs.UUCP>, de at dcl-cs.UUCP (David England) writes:
> Status line entries are used in /etc/termcap but not mentioned in the
> documentation. Does anyone have any info on hs: es: and ts: ?

Well, you can infer what they mean by how sysline(1) uses them.
>From what I can tell,

		hs - Has Status line (boolean)
		ts - move To Status line (string)
		fs - return From Status line (string)
		ds - Delete Status line (string)

Sysline checks for the hs field;  if not found, it exits with the message
"No status capability for {termtype}".  Every write to the status line
is preceded by the ts string and followed by the fs string.  When the
program receives the hangup signal, it sends the ds string.
I haven't seen "es" used anywhere.

Incidentally:  sysline uses the file ".syslinelock" as a binary semaphore.
If you want to temporarily stop sysline from updating the status line,
you just have to create this file.  To resume the updates, remove the file.
This is useful when doing rlogin.  If the remote machine is going to run
sysline, you would want to alias rlogin to something like:
'cat < /dev/null > .syslinelock; /usr/ucb/rlogin \!*; rm .syslinelock'

			Dave Wagner
			University of Washington Comp Sci Department
			wagner at washington.arpa
			{ihnp4,decvax,ucbvax}!uw-beaver!wagner

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