Thread: ncurses and fork

I wanted to use ncurses in a program with fork(), but it seems to screw things up. The only info I found with google were posts like this one with no reply...

Does that mean I'm up a creek? Are there any other options for using console colors? My only thought is to include functions with lots of this:

system("echo -e \"\[\033[1;31m\]\"");

which works, but produces warnings due to some nested conceptualization of escape sequences -- and also does this every time:

[] or []

later...this works without warnings or extraneous output:

Code:

system("echo -en \"\033[1;36m\"");

but it's still no ncurses

It is probably sufficient to close() the terminal descriptors immediately after forking. ncurses can't screw up a terminal that has been closed.

For instance:

Code:

if(fork() == 0)
{
    close(0);
    close(1);
    close(2);
    /* Whatever else */
}

You probably don't want those child processes writing to your terminal anyway, ncurses or not.

Temporarily leaving "cooked" mode seems to work too:

Code:

def_prog_mode();
endwin();
pid=fork();

I think this is the "terminal can't get screwed up if ncurses is closed" version.