Support for the Curses library

The Curses library provides a set of functions that enable you to manipulate a terminal's display regardless of the terminal type. Using this structure, you can manipulate data on a terminal's display. You can instruct curses to treat the entire terminal display as one large window or you can create multiple windows on the display. The windows can be different sizes and can overlap one another.

Each window on a terminal's display has its own window data structure. This structure keeps state information about the window such as its size and where it is located on the display. Curses uses the window data structure to obtain relevant information it needs to carry out your instructions.

The Curses archive file resides in /usr/lib. The name of the Curses archive file is libcurses.a; this file is used for all applications: base 31-bit, XPLINK 31-bit, and 64–bit. The following is an example of compiling test.c with the Curses archive using XPLINK:

c89 -o test -Wc,xplink -Wl,xplink test.c -lcurses

The following is an example of compiling test.c with the Curses archive for a 64–bit application:

c89 -o test -Wc,lp64 -Wl,lp64 test.c -lcurses

For more information about curses, refer to the z/OS C Curses manual.