Best way of finding terminal width/height?

[Joel Hedlund]

> You might want to try just setting a flag in the signal handler
> to see if that prevents the I/O operations on stdin/stdout from
> being interrupted.

Tried this:

<source>

import signal, os, sys
from terminal_info import get_terminal_size

terminal_size = get_terminal_size()

_bTerminalSizeChanged = False

def report_terminal_size_change(signum, frame):
    global _bTerminalSizeChanged
    _bTerminalSizeChanged = True

def update_terminal_size():
    global _bTerminalSizeChanged, terminal_size
    terminal_size = get_terminal_size()
    _bTerminalSizeChanged = False
    
signal.signal(signal.SIGWINCH, report_terminal_size_change)

while True:
    # Do lots of IO (I'm trying to provoke exceptions with signal)
    open('/a/large/file').read()
    #raw_input()
    #sys.stdin.read()
    #print open('/a/large/file').read()
    
    if _bTerminalSizeChanged:
        update_terminal_size()
        print terminal_size

</source>

As before, the only IO case above that doesn't throw exceptions is the uncommented one. 

> Yup, that's the exception.  Standard practice is to catch it and
> retry the I/O operation.

Hmm... I guess it's not that easy to "retry" IO operations on pipes and streams (stdin/stdout in this case)... And I tend to lean pretty heavily on those since I usually write UNIX style text "filters".

So in case I haven't missed something fundamental I guess my best option is to accept defeat (of sorts :-) and be happy with picking a terminal width at program startup.

But anyway, it's been really interesting trying this out. 

Thank you Grant (och Jorgen) for all help and tips!
/Joel