How to get terminal width?

[Bjorn Pettersen]

Donn Cave wrote:
> 
> Quoth Bjorn Pettersen <bjorn at roguewave.com>:
> | Paul Jackson wrote:
> | >
> | > "stty size" isn't defined on my Irix box, but:
> | >
> | >     tput cols
> | >
> | > works on each of my Irix, SuSE and TurboLinux boxes,
> | > issuing simply the number of columns.
> |
> | Well, we're getting closer :-)
> |
> | The above doesn't work on:
> |
> |  SunOS 4.1.4 (not present)
> |  SunOS 5.4 (wrong result)
> |
> | But does work on:
> |
> |  RedHat 6.0
> |  Solaris 2.6, 2.7 (7), 8
> |  HPUX 10.20, 11
> |  AIX 4.2, 4.3
> |  IRIX64 6.2, 6.5
> |  Dec 3.2
> 
> And it works on
>   FreeBSD 4.0, and
>   BeOS 4.5 and 5.0
> 
> However - "tput" is really mainly about terminal-specific information
> retrieved from termcap/terminfo, and that shows in a couple of ways.
> On BeOS, and I bet a few other platforms, I get "80" regardless of
> my actual window size.  It can get the information from the terminal
> description, and that's probably legitimate if not ideal.  Tput also
> fails when the terminal type is unknown (a marginal problem, but could
> be worse than you might think, if the platform suffers from the all
> too common terminfo vs. termcap split.)  All this goes back to the
> dark ages when we had real terminals, with more or less fixed screen sizes.

I also got 80 on SunOS 5.4, but I got the correct result on all the
others.  Probably means that if you get back 80, you really can't tell
if it's real or not though...

-- bjorn