[ILUG] Adjusting terminal width independantly of terminal emulator width

[Brendan Arthurs]

Hi,

When following logfiles using tail -f, I'd like to have the entries
displayed onscreen with a single terminal line used for each logfile
line. That is, I don't want lines longer than the window width to be
wrapped. Ideally they should contine beyond the edge of the terminal,
which could then be scrolled horizontally to read beyond the edge.

As I understand it, wrapping happens based on the COLUMNS environment
variable, which seems to be automatically updated by the terminal
emulator. Setting COLUMNS to a value larger than the current window
width doesn't appear to work, since it gets reset within a few
seconds. 

Does anyone know how to do this? I'm currently using konsole as a
terminal emulator, but if I could get the behaviour described above
from any other terminal emulator I'd happily switch.

Thanks,

Brendan
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