From help-octave-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Fri Jan 10 12:27:58 2003
Subject: Re: How to detect terminal type?
From: Peter Brinkmann <brinkman at math dot uiuc dot edu>
To: Jrigler at colorado dot edu, Miquel.Cabanas@uab.es, help-octave@bevo.che.wisc.edu
Date: Fri, 10 Jan 2003 12:27:53 -0600


Joshua, Miquel,
Thanks for your prompt reply! Unfortunately, neither gshow nor gget will
work for my purposes.

My current situation is this: I'm developing educational software under
Linux, but it also has to work under Windows because that's what most of
my students are using. I was hoping to be able to write some code that
automatically detects, remembers, and resets the terminal type, like

	terminal_type=get_terminal_type();	% remember terminal type
	gset terminal postscript
	... create postscript output
	gset(['terminal ' terminal_type]);	% reset terminal type

Now it appears that this won't work because gshow only displays its result
but doesn't return a value, and gget only works under *nix, in which
case I already know the result.

I'm afraid I'll have to do something like

	gset terminal postscript
	... create postscript output
	if running_under_unix
		gset('terminal x11')
	else
		gset('terminal windows')
	end

This is ugly, but I don't see a better solution.

So, my new question is, what's the best way to detect whether my code is
running under *nix or Windows? I guess I could look at the result of
computer(), but I don't know what kind of result it returns when running
under Windows. Can I detect Windows by checking whether
	findstr(computer(),'windows')
returns a nonzero value, or how should I go about this?
Thanks,
	Peter



On Fri, 2003-01-10 at 09:21, Peter Brinkmann wrote:
> Hi!
> How can I detect the current terminal type?
> I'm asking because I sometimes need to change the terminal type
> in order to export plots to encapsulated PostScript, using a
> command like
> 	gset terminal postscript
> On my Linux box, I can reset the terminal with a command like
> 	gset terminal x11
> The problem is that this doesn't work under Windows. So, what
> I'd like to do is the following:
> 	1. Detect and remember the current terminal type.
> 	2. Export stuff to PostScript.
> 	3. Reset the terminal type to what it was before.
> Is this possible at all?
> Thanks,
> 	Peter



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