I am trying to write a program that can run other text programs through an ncurses interface. Essentially, I want to map a pseudo-terminal to an ncurses window. I have successfully run programs under my program using a pseudo-terminal (with a lot of help from the book "advanced programming in the unix environment"). However, when I try to start ncurses and use its functions to display what I read from the pseudo terminal, I get tons of text full of terminal escape sequences. Is it possible to use ncurses with programs that generate their own escape sequences for the terminal?

Example: ./myprog bash
^[]0;Dan@localhost:~/prog/c/unix^G^[[?1034h[Dan@localhost unix]$ exit

Backspaces appear as ^G (the bell) when there is nothing to erase, and a backspace and ^[[K otherwise.

Sorry if this wasn't clear, please post back if I need to clarify.

If I understand you correctly, you want to use ncurses in your master program to keep track of what's going on, but your slave programs probably also use ncurses in an attempt to format their "screens".

There is no magic bullet for this. Either redesign the slave programs so they just output straight ASCII stuff without all that <Esc> stuff, or grit your teeth and figure out what's going on with those escape sequences.

That's exactly correct. Unfortunately, its not just running ncurses programs under my master program, its also normal programs like bash and echo that don't display correctly, along with the backspace character. Are you saying that I would have to determine what the escape characters mean, and try to emulate that in an ncurses window? That crossed my mind before, but I don't think it would be easy. Could I leverage terminfo to get the meanings of the escape sequences?

That would probably be your best bet.
Yes. Do this:
That will tell you the meaning of all entries in a terminfo data file. But there are many such files, depending on your terminal type. To find out which one you'd be using, do this:
This environment variable shows which terminal type is used in the terminfo entries.

In a simpler world, if the terminal type is vt100, for example, you'd want to look at the file at
But this world is not that simple; that file is already in its compiled form.

I'm running Slackware 12.1, so for me to find all the data in its source form (before tic compiles it), I go here to pick up the source. Within that tarball, the file of interest is misc/terminfo.src.

But the data should be the same regardless of your distribution. I wanted to just slap it all in here for your convenience, but this site doesn't allow source that large. Even if you don't use Slackware, the file in that tarball will be what you want. So download it, find your terminal type (from the TERM environment variable), review the terminfo man page, and knock yourself out.

Hope this helps.

Thanks a lot. This looks fun...