Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!udel!haven!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: using ioctl() to get window-size
Message-ID: <14014@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 4 Oct 90 09:03:14 GMT
References: <1123@travis.csd.harris.com> <10650105@hpisod2.HP.COM>
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, APG, MD.
Lines: 18

In article <10650105@hpisod2.HP.COM> decot@hpisod2.HP.COM (Dave Decot) writes:
>> there some other way to get this info from ioctl other than via TIOCGWINSZ??
>> If so, how portable is it (AT&T only? BSD only? SunOS only? ...)?
>For those systems that have this capability, that's about the most common
>way to do it.  It appears to be mostly on systems derived from SunOS
>(such as System VR3).

Actually, TIOCGWINSZ first appeared under that name on some intermediate
release of 4.2BSD.  SunOS had introduced a very similar ioctl with a slightly
different name, and Berkeley did their usual reengineering act on it.  AT&T
around 1984 had come up with a similar JWINSIZE ioctl to support "layers"
(xt protocol, as used in Blit, 5620, 630, etc. terminals).  AT&T's was
different in one significant way: the size originally could not be set
from user mode; the xt pseudo-device driver took care of setting the size.
(This has since changed somewhat.)

Notice the historical lack of communication among UNIX developers all
working on similar facilities.  Shame, shame.