infotocap(1)

💖 infotocap — the manual page, but make it a group chat 💖

okay bestie, so this is infotocap, from the User commands section of the manual. sit down, hydrate, we're converting terminal descriptions 🫶

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✨ NAME ✨

infotocap — convert a terminfo description into a termcap description

literally that's her whole job. one format in, the other format out. 💅

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

infotocap [tic-option] file ...

infotocap -V

two moods. either you're feeding her files, or you're just asking her who she is (-V). 🌸

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so infotocap translates terminal descriptions. she looks in each given text file for terminfo entries, and for every single one she finds, she writes an analogous termcap description out to the standard output stream. no cap. 🎀

and the cute part: terminfo “use” capabilities translate to termcap tc capabilities. it's giving ✨correspondence✨.

⚠️ but here's the tea: because termcap is a less expressive format than terminfo, some capabilities cannot be translated. that's not a bug, that's just the format being smaller than the vibes she's holding. 💀

this utility is implemented as a link to tic(1), with the latter's -C option implied. so you can also use other tic options, such as -1, -f, -v, -w, and -x. she's sharing the closet, iykyk. 👑

the -V option reports the version of ncurses associated with this program and exits with a successful status. main character energy, exits clean. ⭐

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✨ FILES ✨

• /etc/terminfo — compiled terminal description database 🗂️

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✨ EXTENSIONS ✨

this command is an ncurses extension. so if you're not on ncurses, don't come for her, she never claimed to be everywhere. 💜

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✨ PORTABILITY ✨

• X/Open Curses Issue 7 (2009) does not specify this command.
• SVr4 and NetBSD curses do not implement it.

so yeah, this is a whole ncurses-specific situation. not universal, not sorry. 🙈

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✨ AUTHORS ✨

Eric S. Raymond <esr@snark.thyrsus.com> and Thomas E. Dickey <dickey@invisible-island.net>

the parents of the whole thing, we love them, we thank them 🫶🌸

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✨ SEE ALSO ✨

• infocmp(1)
• tic(1)
• ncurses(3NCURSES)
• terminfo(5)

go read those too bestie, she's not doing this alone, it's a whole friend group 🦋

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and that's the page! 🎀 this one came from ncurses 6.6, dated 2025-10-04. slay, periodt, go convert something 💖✨