Re: Proposed patch - psql wraps at window width

Tom Lane wrote:
> Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> writes:
>
>> I don't see that behavior here on Ubuntu 7.10:
>> $ COLUMNNS=120 ls -C |cat
>> archive cd initrd lost+found proc srv usr
>> basement.usr dev initrd.img media root sys var
>> bin etc laptop mnt rtmp tmp vmlinuz
>> boot home lib opt sbin u win
>> $ ls --version
>> ls (GNU coreutils) 5.97
>>
> Well, it's *certainly* gonna ignore "COLUMNNS".
>
> regards, tom lane
>
I'm having trouble seeing the relevance, either way. First many shells
don't set $COLUMNS at all (readline does it for psql). And most shells
that set $COLUMNS don't export it. So most people get different output
from:

# ls -C
# ls -C | cat

Unless they are in the habit of doing:

# COLUMNS=$COLUMNS ls -C |cat

I think it's too weird to default pipes to whatever the terminal width
happens to be. So that leaves you with an explicit command to set the
width for pipes.

-Bryce

Echo $MANWIDTH