From: Breathnach, Proinnsias (Dublin) (breatpro at domain exchange.ie.ml.com)
Date: Tue 04 Jun 2002 - 11:50:44 IST
Agreed, chopping really only makes sense for a tty output,
My point was though, that ps does chop (generally) at $TERM_WIDTH (or
whatever the variable is) on a tty, but at 80 on a pipe for historical
reasons ... backward compatibility being of importance to the authors.
P
> -----Original Message-----
> I think you missed the point, which was, chopping at a character
> length makes more sense when output is a tty, rather than when
> output is a pipe (where the output is not going to be processed by
> human eyes or possibly even be produced to a terminal).
>
> Breathnach, Proinnsias (Dublin)'s [breatpro at domain exchange.ie.ml.com] 27 lines
> of wisdom included:
> > Um, Padraig ....
> > tty generally has a term-width variable which ps can use, so chopping to
> 80
> > may not be sensible ... on the other hand, many utils (esp on older
> systems)
> > had a STDIN width of what was then tty standard 80 cols, which is where
> the
> > limitation began.
> >
> > I'd imagine _most_ utils nowadays can take more than 80 cols on STDIN /
> > piped input, but not all, so it only makes sense to retain the
> limitation
> > until such time as the utils are upgraded.
>
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