Termios For Windows
A terminal for a more modern age. DOWNLOAD GITHUB. TermiWin is a library which purpose is to allow you to use on a Windows system, the same code used in Linux to communicate with a device through a serial port. This is possible because termios’s functions have been rewritten to be compatible with Windows’s COM functions. The following are 30 code examples for showing how to use termios.tcgetattr.These examples are extracted from open source projects. You can vote up the ones you like or vote down the ones you don't like, and go to the original project or source file by following the links above each example. Subject: libgda Don't try to use termios.h on Windows; Date: Mon, 7 Jun 2010 19:29:37 +0000.
(This is part two of a multi-part introduction to termios and terminalemulation on UNIX. Read part 1 if you’re new here)
In this entry, we’ll look at the interfaces that are used to controlthe behavior of the “termios” box sitting between the master andslave pty. The behaviors I described last time are fine if you have acompletely dumb program talking to the terminal, but if the programover on the right is using curses (like emacs or vim), or even justreadline (like bash), it will want to disable or customize some of thebehaviors.
The primary programmatic interface to termios is the struct termios
and two functions:
- Generated: 2020-12-23 20:33:13 UTC.
- However, you can try build a recent termcap version and patch termios.h form either Linux or one of the BSD's. A better while easier approach is probably just changing the Ngaro source code for using the Windows API interface instead.
which retrieve and set the struct termios
associated with a given terminal device.They are all documented in termios(3)
(If you’reunfamiliar with the convention, that means document termios
in section3
of the unix man
pages – man 3 termios
on a command-line willget it for you).
So what’s inside struct termios
? POSIXspecifies that this structure contains at least the following fields:
Each “flag” field contains a number of flags (implemented as a bitmask) that can be individually enabled or disabled.c_iflag
and c_oflag
contain flags that affect the processingof input and output, respectively. c_cflag
we will mostly ignore, asit contains settings that relate to the control of modems and seriallines that are mostly irrelevant these days. c_lflag
is perhaps the most interesting of the flag values. Itcontains flags that control the broad-scale behavior of thetty
. I’ll look at just a few of the interesting bits in each:
local modes 🔗︎
ICANON
- Perhaps the most important bit inc_lflag
is theICANON
bit. Enabling it enables “canonical” mode – also known as“line editing” mode. WhenICANON
/wwe-2k17-pc-key-generator.html. is set, the terminal buffers a lineat a time, and enables line editing. WithoutICANON
, input is madeavailable to programs immediately (this is also known as “cbreak”mode).ECHO
inc_lflag
controls whether input is immediately re-echoed asoutput. It is independent ofICANON
, although they are often turned on and off together. Whenpasswd
prompts for your password, your terminal is in canonical mode, butECHO
is disabled.ISIG
inc_lflag
controls whether^C
and^Z
(and friends) generate signals ornot. When unset, they are passed directly through as characters,without generating signals to the application.
input and output modes 🔗︎
There are also a few flags in c_iflag
and c_oflag
worth mentioning.
IXON
inc_iflag
enables the “flow control” mediated by^S
and^Q
(by default). WithIXON
, once^S
has been receivedby the master pty, the slave will not accept any output (write
s to it will hang) until^Q
is received by the master pty.IUTF8
inc_iflag
is an interesting hack. In canonical mode, backspace needs todelete the previous character in the input buffer. In non-ASCII encodings, a single character may be several bytes long, but the terminal still only sees a byte stream, and has no explicit information about the encoding or character boundaries on either end.IUTF8
tells termios that the input stream is utf-8 encoded, which permits thecorrect handling of backspace. IfIUTF8
is unset, and you enter amultibyte character and then press backspace, only the final byte willbe deleted, leaving you with a corrupt utf-8 stream.OLCUC
inc_oflag
“Map[s] lowercase characters to uppercase onoutput.” Just in CASE YOU NEED YOUR TERMINAL TO LOOK MORE LIKESHOUTING.
There are many more flags, controlling such details as newline translation and how character erase works. The full list is documented in termios(3)
.
c_cc 🔗︎
Next up is c_cc
. This field sets the various control characters used to interact with theterminal. Bartpe xp sp3 iso download. Characters like ^C
and ^Z
and delete that have special meanings to termios are not hard coded anywhere, but rather defined via the c_cc
array.
c_cc
is indexed by various constants for the various control characters, andthe value at any index is the character that should have that effect. Some of the notable ones are:
VINTR
– Generate aSIGINT
(^C
by default).VSUSP
– Generate aSIGTSTP
(stop the program) (^Z
by default).VERASE
– Erase the previous character. This tends to be one of^H
and^?
(ASCII0x7f
) by default – if you’ve ever pressed“backspace” and been greeted by a^H
, your terminal and yourstruct termios
disagree on the value ofVERASE
.VEOF
– End of file. Sends the current line to the programwithout waiting for end-of-line, or, as the first character on the line, causes the nextread
call by the slave to return return end-of-file. (^D
by default)VSTOP
andVSTART
–^S
and^Q
by default, stop and startoutput.
Setting any of these to NULL (0) disables that special control character. Many of the c_cc
elements are only relevant when certain modes are active – VINTR
and VSUSP
, for instance, only matter if ISIG
is enabled in c_lflag
, and VSTOP
and VSTART
are ignored unless IXON
is set.
(A brief note on the representation of control characters – The characters ^A
through ^Z
, pronounced “Ctrl-FOO”, are represented by the bytes with values 1 through 26. So when I say that c_cc[VINTR]
is equal to ^C
by default,that’s actually just the number 3
– your terminal took the keypresses and just translated them into the byte 3
on the wire.)
stty 🔗︎
While termios(3)
is the standard programmatic interface to controltermios, a much more convenient interface for experimentation is thestty
program, which is just a thin wrapper around tcgetattr
andtcsetattr
designed to be usable from shell scripts or directly from the shell.
stty
gets or sets options on a terminal device. By default, it operates on the one connected to its standard out, but you can pass it an arbitrary device using the -F
option.
Without aguments, stty
prints in what way its terminal’s settings differ from an internal set of “sane”defaults. stty -a
causes it to print the value of every flag in thestruct termios
in a human-readable format.
You can toggle flags using stty flag to enable a flag, and stty-flag to disable it. So for instance, stty -isig
will disablesignal generation – run a program after doing this, and you’ll findyourself unable to ^C
it. In general it uses the same names as the C constants, except in lowercase, but check the man page if in doubt.
stty
can also change the value of the control characters inc_cc
, using stty symbolic-namecharacter. If you wanted ^G
to be the interrupt character, instead of ^C
, a simple stty intr ^G
would suffice. You can spell 0
as undef
to disable a given control character. So, if you hate flowcontrol and want to totally disable it, you could try stty -ixon stop undef
– disable IXON
, and then also disable the VSTOP
character for good measure. (You might still be foiled by screen or some other layer doing its own flow control, unfortunately).
Termios For Windows 10
stty
's -F
option can be great for peeking at what some other program isdoing to its terminal. If you run tty
in a shell, it will print thepath to that shell’s terminal device (usually of the form/dev/pts/N, at least under Linux). Now,from a different shell, you can run stty -a -F /dev/pts/N to see howthe first shell’s terminal is configured. You can then run programsin the first shell, and repeat the stty
incant in shell two to seewhat settings are getting set. For example, if I run stty -F /dev/pts/10
right now (while I have a bash
talking to a gnome-terminal
via that pty), I see:
So we can see that bash/readline has disabled CR→LF translation on input (icrnl
), disabled canonical mode and echo, but turned on UTF-8 mode (because bash detected a utf-8 locale). Note that if I run stty
directly in that shell, I see something slightly different:
This is because bash maintains its own set of termios settings (for readline), and saves and restores settings around running programs, so that settings in place while running a program are different from those in place while you’re typing at the bash prompt.
Termius For Windows
In the next post, we’ll look at signal generation from ISIG
and how it interacts with job control in your shell.
Addendum: ioctl(2)
🔗︎
This last section is a brief aside, which has very little to do with termios specifically, so you should feel free to skip it. But read on if you’re curious about some of the low-level details of how the APIs work.
If you’re familiar with man page conventions, you may have noticedthat the termios
functions are in man page section 3, which meansthat they’re provided by system libraries, and are not systemcalls. But at the same time, I told you last time that termios isimplemented inside the kernel – so how are the libraries talking tothe kernel, if not through syscalls?
The answer is a single odd little catch-all system call, known asioctl
. Historically, one of the “big ideas” of UNIX was that“everything is a file” – you could communicate with devices just likeyou could files, by opening files in /dev/
. But a file on UNIX is also just a stream of bytes, without anyOS-imposed structure. And for a device, you may often need to sendout-of-band control data – e.g. to set the baud and parity bit settings on aserial port. And adding new system calls for every new device type wouldbe untenable for a number of reasons.
So the answer was one new new system call, ioctl
(pronounced as anyof “I-O-cuddle”, “I-octal” or “I-O-C-T-L”). ioctl
is prototyped as:
It takes a file descriptor, a numeric “request” code, and an unspecified number ofother arguments. ioctl
looks up whatever device (or filesystem, network protcol, or whatever) is backing that file descriptor, and hands it the “request” and the argumentsto do with as they will.
So any device that needs extra control channels can define some ioctl
numbers and parameters and document them somewhere, and they become the interface to control that device. So, for instance (at least on Linux), an ioctl
on a tty device with a “request” of TCGETS
(defined in termios.h
) takes a parameter that is a pointer to a struct termios
, and copies the in-kernel settings for that tty to the provided struct. So somewhere in libc, tcgetattr(fd, p)
is just defined to do an ioctl(fd, TCGETS, p)
. Similar ioctls are defined for tcsetattr
and all the functions in termios(3)
. On Linux, at least, the morbidly curious can find out all the gory details in tty_ioctl(4)
.