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This manual documents Sortix cross-nightly. You can instead view this document in the latest official manual.

NAME

tic — terminfo compiler

SYNOPSIS

tic [-acSsx] [-o file] source [term1 term2 ...]

DESCRIPTION

The tic utility compiles terminfo(5) source into a database for use by other programs. The created database path name is the same as the source but with .cdb appended.
The following options are available:
-a
Do not discard commented out capabilities.
-c
Only check for errors, don't write the final database.
-o file
Write the database to file instead of source.cdb.
-S
For term1, term2, ... output a C structure containing name, compiled description, and compiled size. This can be used to embed terminal descriptions into a program.
-s
Display the number of terminal descriptions written to the database.
-x
Include non standard capabilities defined in the source.

Extensions To Terminfo

When tic discovers a use=term capability, the terminal description for term is merged in. Capabilities do not overwrite previously discovered ones and capabilities ending with @ are marked as absent so the terminal does not inherit the capability from used terminals.

EXIT STATUS

The tic utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

EXAMPLES

To maintain your private terminfo definitions, if the system supplied ones do not support your terminal:
tic ~/.terminfo

SEE ALSO

infocmp(1), tput(1), curses(3), terminfo(5)

STANDARDS

The tic utility works with terminfo files that conform to the X/Open Curses Issue 4, Version 2 (“XCURSES4.2”) standard.

AUTHORS

Roy Marples <roy@NetBSD.org>
Copyright 2011-2025 Jonas 'Sortie' Termansen and contributors.
Sortix's source code is free software under the ISC license.
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