Getting terminal width in C?

Question

I\'ve been looking for a way to get the terminal width from within my C program. What I keep coming up with is something along the lines of:

#include 

        

Answer 1

This example is a bit on the lengthy side, but I believe it's the most portable way of detecting the terminal dimensions. This also handles resize events.

As tim and rlbond suggests, I'm using ncurses. It guarantees a great improvement in terminal compatability as compared to reading environment variables directly.

#include 
#include 
#include 

// SIGWINCH is called when the window is resized.
void handle_winch(int sig){
  signal(SIGWINCH, SIG_IGN);

  // Reinitialize the window to update data structures.
  endwin();
  initscr();
  refresh();
  clear();

  char tmp[128];
  sprintf(tmp, "%dx%d", COLS, LINES);

  // Approximate the center
  int x = COLS / 2 - strlen(tmp) / 2;
  int y = LINES / 2 - 1;

  mvaddstr(y, x, tmp);
  refresh();

  signal(SIGWINCH, handle_winch);
}

int main(int argc, char *argv[]){
  initscr();
  // COLS/LINES are now set

  signal(SIGWINCH, handle_winch);

  while(getch() != 27){
    /* Nada */
  }

  endwin();

  return(0);
}