Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2009 16:36:54 +0200 From: Adrian Penisoara <ady@freebsd.ady.ro> To: Ivan Radovanovic <rivanr@gmail.com> Cc: Ed Schouten <ed@80386.nl>, Brian Somers <brian@freebsd.org>, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Deprecating ps(1)s -w switch Message-ID: <78cb3d3f0908250736g2ef52068pb84896eac5a2c45d@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <4A93EE5B.8000300@gmail.com> References: <20090825034054.2d57e733@dev.lan.Awfulhak.org> <20090825134447.GM2829@hoeg.nl> <4A93EE5B.8000300@gmail.com>
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Hi, On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 3:59 PM, Ivan Radovanovic <rivanr@gmail.com> wrote: > Ed Schouten napisa: > > * 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 think it would be smart not to limit width by default (ie default > behavior to be like with -ww), but to have some switch (like -w) to limit > width if someone really needs to do that, although with "cut -c 1-80" could > be achieved limiting... Let's not reverse the meaning of switches, for the sake of compatibility with (older) existent scripts... Maybe we should also think about compatibility with System V Unix / Linux -- I have encountered quite a lot of scripts expecting "ps -ef" to give an "all processes" output. It would not hurt to review what the Linux folks did with their ps(1) -- it supports 3 kinds of options for UNIX/BSD/GNU flavors. Regards, Adrian Penisoara EnterpriseBSD
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