form_field_info(3x)

form_field_info3x

Retrieve field characteristics

Usage

#include <form.h>

int field_info(const FIELD *field,
int *rows, int *cols,
int *frow, int *fcol,
int *nrow, int *nbuf);

int dynamic_field_info(const FIELD *field,
int *rows, int *cols, int *max);

Overview

The function field_info returns the sizes and other attributes passed in to the field at its creation time. The attributes are: height, width, row of upper-left corner, column of upper-left corner, number off-screen rows, and number of working buffers.

The function dynamic_field_info returns the actual size of the field, and its maximum possible size. If the field has no size limit, the location addressed by the third argument will be set to 0. A field can be made dynamic by turning off the O_STATIC option with field_opts_off.

Return value

These routines return one of the following:

E_OK

The routine succeeded.

E_SYSTEM_ERROR

System error occurred (see errno(3)).

E_BAD_ARGUMENT

Routine detected an incorrect or out-of-range argument.

Portability

These routines emulate the System V forms library. They were not supported on Version 7 or BSD versions.

A null (zero pointer) is accepted for any of the return values, to ignore that value. Not all implementations allow this, e.g., Solaris 2.7 does not.

Authors

Juergen Pfeifer. Manual pages and adaptation for new curses by Eric S. Raymond.

From ncurses 6.6-2 in Arch Linux 2026-11-01. Parsed by carta from the page's man source.