Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2009 16:09:09 +0200 From: Jonathan McKeown <j.mckeown@ru.ac.za> To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Deprecating ps(1)s -w switch Message-ID: <200908251609.09302.j.mckeown@ru.ac.za> In-Reply-To: <20090825134447.GM2829@hoeg.nl> References: <20090825034054.2d57e733@dev.lan.Awfulhak.org> <20090825134447.GM2829@hoeg.nl>
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On Tuesday 25 August 2009 15:44:47 Ed Schouten wrote: > * Brian Somers <brian@FreeBSD.org> wrote: > > I recently closed bin/137647 and had second thoughts after Ivan (the > > originator) challenged my reason for closing it. > > > > The suggestion is that ps's -w switch is a strange artifact that can > > be safely deprecated. ps goes to great lengths to implement width > > limitations, and any time I've seen people not using -ww has either > > been a mistake or doesn't matter. Using 'cut -c1-N' is also a great > > way of limiting widths if people really want that... > > > > I'd like to propose changing ps so that width limits are removed and > > '-w' is deprecated - ignored for now with a note in the man page > > saying that it will be removed in a future release. > > > > Does anyone have any objections to doing this? I don't propose > > merging this back into stable/8. > > So ps(1) output can never be limited to the screen width? I usually want to see ps(1) output in easily-read columns. Without width limits, this can't be guaranteed. I would strongly object to the complete removal of any option to limit the output width of ps(1) and make it easily human-readable. I'm also astonished at the suggestion that not using -ww is ``a mistake''. I very seldom need to see the whole commandline for every process. Jonathan
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