From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Aug 17 18: 7:23 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (okc-27-141-144.mmcable.com [24.27.141.144]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id F11D837B405 for ; Fri, 17 Aug 2001 18:07:17 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mwm@mired.org) Received: (qmail 2091 invoked by uid 100); 18 Aug 2001 01:07:15 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15229.49091.240322.495816@guru.mired.org> Date: Fri, 17 Aug 2001 20:07:15 -0500 To: "Kevin Oberman" Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: ps & terminal width sensitivity inside a script In-Reply-To: <78662125@toto.iv> X-Mailer: VM 6.90 under 21.1 (patch 14) "Cuyahoga Valley" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Kevin Oberman types: > ps(1) is a very old utility dating at least back to the earliest days of > Unix. (It might even date to Multics, but I can't say for sure.) Back > in the days of Teletypes and big honkin' printers. Back in the days > when teletypes were 80 characters wide and line printers 132 > characters wide. Back in the days when there was nothing else. > > The SysV ps(1) started from scratch behaving in a reasonable fashion, > but BSD systems seem forever tied to the bygone days of Teletypes. The BSD ps now defaults to the window width, not 80. If it can't find the window width, it uses 80. w is 132 and ww is unlimited. Personally, I like that behavior. w is pretty much useless these days, but I don't see a lot of reason to change it. As to having that work in scripts - the output of scripts is often viewed by users, so it makes sense to me. http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message