if \n is newline, and \t is horizontal tab what's "home"; as in put the cursor back to the start of the current line? I've searched high & low, but can't seem to find any info anywhere.
Carriage Return.
Don't rely on this not to do a Line Feed, manufacturers differ on this point (see, they can't even agree on ASCII!).
The reason C has such a small range of easy-to-type control characters is that they are about all that is standard. Even then \n (Line Feed) might issue a Carriage Return to your terminal to have the desired "new line" effect and \t (Tab) might not have 8th column tab stops. Similarly, Form Feed might or might not clear the screen and Null and Delete might or might not print characters.
What is needed is a library to hide all these issues from your program (such as ncurses) or for your application to avoid this tar pit altogether.
The choice will depend on what you use the program for. I'd try and avoid screen formatting ask much as you can. If you must do it, have a isatty() call that suppresses the screen formating so you can say
myprogram > file.txt
without file.txt containing a world of screen movement characters.
-- Glen Turner (08) 8303 3936 or +61 8 8303 3936 Australian Academic and Research Network www.aarnet.edu.au
-- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
