scr_dump(5) File formats scr_dump(5)
NAME
scr_dump - curses screen dump
DESCRIPTION
The curses library provides applications with the ability to write the
contents of a window to an external file using scr_dump or putwin, and
read it back using scr_restore or getwin.
The putwin and getwin functions do the work; while scr_dump and scr_re-
store conveniently save and restore the whole screen, i.e., stdscr.
ncurses6
A longstanding implementation of screen-dump was revised with ncurses6
to remedy problems with the earlier approach:
• A “magic number” is written to the beginning of the dump file, al-
lowing applications (such as file(1)) to recognize curses dump
files.
Because ncurses6 uses a new format, that requires a new magic number
was unused by other applications. This 16-bit number was unused:
0x8888 (octal “\210\210”)
but to be more certain, this 32-bit number was chosen:
0x88888888 (octal “\210\210\210\210”)
This is the pattern submitted to the maintainers of the file pro-
gram:
#
# ncurses5 (and before) did not use a magic number,
# making screen dumps "data".
#
# ncurses6 (2015) uses this format, ignoring byte-order
0 string \210\210\210\210ncurses ncurses6 screen image
#
• The screen dumps are written in textual form, so that internal data
sizes are not directly related to the dump-format, and enabling the
library to read dumps from either narrow- or wide-character- config-
urations.
The narrow library configuration holds characters and video attrib-
utes in a 32-bit chtype, while the wide-character library stores
this information in the cchar_t structure, which is much larger than
32-bits.
• It is possible to read a screen dump into a terminal with a differ-
ent screen-size, because the library truncates or fills the screen
as necessary.
• The ncurses6 getwin reads the legacy screen dumps from ncurses5.
ncurses5 (Legacy)
The screen-dump feature was added to ncurses in June 1995. While there
were fixes and improvements in succeeding years, the basic scheme was
unchanged:
• The WINDOW structure was written in binary form.
• The WINDOW structure refers to lines of data, which were written as
an array of binary data following the WINDOW.
• When getwin restored the window, it would keep track of offsets into
the array of line-data and adjust the WINDOW structure which was
read back into memory.
This is similar to Unix System V, but does not write a “magic number” to
identify the file format.
PORTABILITY
There is no standard format for curses screen dumps. A brief survey of
the existing implementations follows.
X/Open Curses
X/Open Curses Issue 7 specifies little. It says (boldface emphasis
added)
“[t]he getwin() function reads window-related data stored in the file
by putwin(). The function then creates and initializes a new window
using that data.
The putwin() function writes all data associated with win into the
stdio stream to which filep points, using an unspecified format.
This information can be retrieved later using getwin().”
In the mid-1990s when the X/Open Curses document was written, there were
still System V systems using older, less capable curses libraries. BSD
curses was not relevant to X/Open because it did not meet the criteria
for base-level conformance; see ncurses(3NCURSES).
System V
System V curses identified the file format by writing a “magic number”
at the beginning of the dump. The WINDOW data and the lines of text
follow, all in binary form.
Solaris curses has the following definitions.
/* terminfo magic number */
#define MAGNUM 0432
/* curses screen dump magic number */
#define SVR2_DUMP_MAGIC_NUMBER 0433
#define SVR3_DUMP_MAGIC_NUMBER 0434
That is, the feature was likely introduced in SVr2 (1984), and improved
in SVr3 (1987). Solaris curses has no magic number for SVr4 (1989).
Other System V operating systems (AIX and HP-UX) use a magic number that
would correspond to the following.
/* curses screen dump magic number */
#define SVR4_DUMP_MAGIC_NUMBER 0435
That octal number in bytes is 001, 035. Because most Unix vendors at
the time used big-endian hardware, the magic number is written with the
high-order byte first.
\001\035
After the magic number, the WINDOW structure and line data are written
in binary format. While the magic number used by these systems can be
observed with od(1), none of them documents the format used for screen
dumps.
Nor do they use an identical format, even with the System V family. The
ncurses savescreen test program was used to collect information for this
manual page. It produced dumps of different size (all on 64-bit hard-
ware, on 40x80 screens):
• AIX (51817 bytes)
• HP-UX (90093 bytes)
• Solaris 10 (13273 bytes)
• ncurses5 (12888 bytes)
Solaris
As noted above, Solaris curses has no magic number corresponding to SVr4
curses. This is odd, since Solaris was the first operating system to
meet the SVr4 guidelines. Solaris furthermore supplies two versions of
curses.
• The default curses library uses the SVr3 magic number.
• An alternate curses library (which we term xcurses), available in
/usr/xpg4, uses a textual format with no magic number.
According to its copyright notice, this xcurses library was devel-
oped by MKS (Mortice Kern Systems) from 1990 to 1995.
Like ncurses6, it includes a header with parameters. Unlike
ncurses6, the contents of the window are written piecemeal, with co-
ordinates and attributes for each chunk of text rather than writing
the whole window from top to bottom.
PDCurses
PDCurses added support for screen dumps in version 2.7 (2005). Like
System V and ncurses5, it writes the WINDOW structure in binary, but be-
gins the file with its three-byte identifier “PDC”, followed by a sin-
gle-byte version number.
“PDC\001”
NetBSD
As of April 2017, NetBSD curses does not support scr_dump and
scr_restore (or scr_init, scr_set), although it has putwin and getwin.
Like ncurses5, NetBSD putwin does not identify its dumps with a useful
magic number. It writes
• the curses shared library major and minor versions as the first two
bytes (for example, 7 and 1),
• followed by a binary dump of the WINDOW,
• some data for wide characters referenced by the WINDOW structure,
and
• finally, lines as done by other implementations.
EXAMPLES
Given a simple program which writes text to the screen (and for the sake
of example, limiting the screen-size to 10x20):
#include <curses.h>
int
main(void)
{
putenv("LINES=10");
putenv("COLUMNS=20");
initscr();
start_color();
init_pair(1, COLOR_WHITE, COLOR_BLUE);
init_pair(2, COLOR_RED, COLOR_BLACK);
bkgd(COLOR_PAIR(1));
move(4, 5);
attron(A_BOLD);
addstr("Hello");
move(5, 5);
attroff(A_BOLD);
attrset(A_REVERSE | COLOR_PAIR(2));
addstr("World!");
refresh();
scr_dump("foo.out");
endwin();
return 0;
}
When run using ncurses6, the output looks like this:
\210\210\210\210ncurses 6.0.20170415
_cury=5
_curx=11
_maxy=9
_maxx=19
_flags=14
_attrs=\{REVERSE|C2}
flag=_idcok
_delay=-1
_regbottom=9
_bkgrnd=\{NORMAL|C1}\s
rows:
1:\{NORMAL|C1}\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s
2:\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s
3:\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s
4:\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s
5:\s\s\s\s\s\{BOLD}Hello\{NORMAL}\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s
6:\s\s\s\s\s\{REVERSE|C2}World!\{NORMAL|C1}\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s
7:\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s
8:\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s
9:\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s
10:\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s\s
The first four octal escapes are actually nonprinting characters, while
the remainder of the file is printable text. You may notice:
• The actual color pair values are not written to the file.
• All characters are shown in printable form; spaces are “\s” to en-
sure they are not overlooked.
• Attributes are written in escaped curly braces, e.g., “\{BOLD}”, and
may include a color pair (C1 or C2 in this example).
• The parameters in the header are written out only if they are
nonzero. When reading back, order does not matter.
Running the same program with Solaris xpg4 curses gives this dump:
MAX=10,20
BEG=0,0
SCROLL=0,10
VMIN=1
VTIME=0
FLAGS=0x1000
FG=0,0
BG=0,0,
0,0,0,1,
0,19,0,0,
1,0,0,1,
1,19,0,0,
2,0,0,1,
2,19,0,0,
3,0,0,1,
3,19,0,0,
4,0,0,1,
4,5,0x20,0,Hello
4,10,0,1,
4,19,0,0,
5,0,0,1,
5,5,0x4,2,World!
5,11,0,1,
5,19,0,0,
6,0,0,1,
6,19,0,0,
7,0,0,1,
7,19,0,0,
8,0,0,1,
8,19,0,0,
9,0,0,1,
9,19,0,0,
CUR=11,5
Solaris getwin requires that all parameters are present, and in the same
order. The xpg4 curses library does not know about the bce (back color
erase) capability, and does not color the window background.
On the other hand, the SVr4 curses library does know about the back-
ground color. However, its screen dumps are in binary. Here is the
corresponding dump (using “od -t x1”):
0000000 1c 01 c3 d6 f3 58 05 00 0b 00 0a 00 14 00 00 00
0000020 00 00 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
0000040 00 00 b8 1a 06 08 cc 1a 06 08 00 00 09 00 10 00
0000060 00 00 00 80 00 00 20 00 00 00 ff ff ff ff 00 00
0000100 ff ff ff ff 00 00 00 00 20 80 00 00 20 80 00 00
0000120 20 80 00 00 20 80 00 00 20 80 00 00 20 80 00 00
*
0000620 20 80 00 00 20 80 00 00 20 80 00 00 48 80 00 04
0000640 65 80 00 04 6c 80 00 04 6c 80 00 04 6f 80 00 04
0000660 20 80 00 00 20 80 00 00 20 80 00 00 20 80 00 00
*
0000740 20 80 00 00 20 80 00 00 20 80 00 00 57 00 81 00
0000760 6f 00 81 00 72 00 81 00 6c 00 81 00 64 00 81 00
0001000 21 00 81 00 20 80 00 00 20 80 00 00 20 80 00 00
0001020 20 80 00 00 20 80 00 00 20 80 00 00 20 80 00 00
*
0001540 20 80 00 00 20 80 00 00 00 00 f6 d1 01 00 f6 d1
0001560 08 00 00 00 40 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 07
0001600 00 04 00 01 00 01 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 00
0001620 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
*
0002371
AUTHORS
Thomas E. Dickey
extended screen-dump format for ncurses 6.0 (2015)
Eric S. Raymond
screen dump feature in ncurses 1.9.2d (1995)
SEE ALSO
scr_dump(3NCURSES), util(3NCURSES)
ncurses 6.5 2025-01-18 scr_dump(5)
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