Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Tue, 25 Aug 2009 14:42:15 +0200
From:      Alexey Shuvaev <shuvaev@physik.uni-wuerzburg.de>
To:        Brian Somers <brian@FreeBSD.org>
Cc:        freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org, Ivan Radovanovic <rivanr@gmail.com>
Subject:   Re: Deprecating ps(1)s -w switch
Message-ID:  <20090825124215.GA80035@wep4035.physik.uni-wuerzburg.de>
In-Reply-To: <20090825034054.2d57e733@dev.lan.Awfulhak.org>
References:  <20090825034054.2d57e733@dev.lan.Awfulhak.org>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 03:40:54AM -0700, Brian Somers 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.
> 
Do you want to remove '-w' switch preserving '-ww' one? IMO this seems awkward.
Also, by ignoring it for now do you mean that behavior of ps with '-w'
switch would be the same as without it? I would prefer that '-w' == '-ww'.
One can remove all references to multiple 'w' switches from the man page
but leave ps itself insensitive to any number of 'w' switches
(so '-w' == '-ww' == '-www' == ...).
This also would be consistent with (for example)
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=ps&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=Red+Hat+Linux%2Fi386+9&format=html

> Does anyone have any objections to doing this?  I don't propose
> merging this back into stable/8.
> 
0.02$,
Alexey.



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20090825124215.GA80035>