Am Dienstag, 29. April 2008 schrieb Bruce Momjian:
> We do look at COLUMNS if the ioctl() fails, but not for file/pipe
> output.
This is quite a useless complication. Readline uses exactly the same ioctl()
call to determine the columns, so if ioctl() were to fail, then COLUMNS would
be unset or wrong as well.