Best way of finding terminal width/height?

Hi all!

I use python for writing terminal applications and I have been bothered by how hard it seems to be to determine the terminal size. What is the best way of doing this?

At the end I've included a code snippet from Chuck Blake 'ls' app in python. It seems to do the job just fine on my comp, but regrettably, I'm not sassy enough to wrap my head around the fine grain details on this one. How cross-platform is this? Is there a more pythonic way of doing this? Say something like:

from ingenious_module import terminal_info
cols, rows = terminal_info.size()

Thanks for your time (and thanks Chuck for sharing your code!)
/Joel Hedlund
IFM Bioinformatics
Linköping University

Chuck Blake's terminal_size code snippet:
(from http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~cblake/cls/cls.py).

def ioctl_GWINSZ(fd): #### TABULATION FUNCTIONS
try: ### Discover terminal width
import fcntl, termios, struct, os
cr = struct.unpack('hh',
fcntl.ioctl(fd, termios.TIOCGWINSZ, '1234'))
except:
return None
return cr

def terminal_size():
### decide on *some* terminal size
# try open fds
cr = ioctl_GWINSZ(0) or ioctl_GWINSZ(1) or ioctl_GWINSZ(2)
if not cr:
# ...then ctty
try:
fd = os.open(os.ctermid(), os.O_RDONLY)
cr = ioctl_GWINSZ(fd)
os.close(fd)
except:
pass
if not cr:
# env vars or finally defaults
try:
cr = (env['LINES'], env['COLUMNS'])
except:
cr = (25, 80)
# reverse rows, cols
return int(cr[1]), int(cr[0])
.

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