$COLUMNS impacts whether output is displayed

[Marco van Hulten]

If and only if I make sure that the $COLUMNS is about 90 or higher, all output is presented by my commands. When the output does not fit and $COLUMNS is shorter than what needs to be printed (minus another few characters), the line is not displayed at all.

This comes about when I reduce my terminal width sufficiently or increase the font sufficiently, but resetting $COLUMNS to a value wider than the terminal is a work-around resulting in the display of the output.

Conversely, in

    COLUMNS=20 ps axu | grep cups[d]

$COLUMNS is sufficiently low (supposedly sufficiently smaller than the length of the output line with `cupsd') to produce the error.

For unknown reason, I cannot reproduce it by means of cat(1)ing, grep(1)ing or even cat & grepping (just to have the pipe) some text file with long lines.

The shell does not matter (happens with bash and ksh).

I am using Sakura 3.8.5 on OpenBSD-current.

[David Gómez (dabisu)]

Hello Marco,

Are you having this issue only with 'ps' or also with other commands?

If only happens with 'ps', please use the 'w' option like in 'ps axuw'. Or maybe add an alias to avoid typing everytime the 'w' option.