Tom Lane wrote: > Aidan Van Dyk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > But one of the interesting things is that psql has an is *interactive* > > mode (something the GNU utils don't have to worry about). So *when* you > > choose to figure out your columns is important, and really impacts > > behaviour too. > > Well, COLUMNS has no hope of tracking on-the-fly changes of window size, > which is why the ioctl should take precedence over it.
True, but Peter wanted COLUMNS to be honored over ioctl(): http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2008-04/msg01853.php > > Correctly documenting it is good, just as the version of GNU ls I have > > on Debian, where I see: > > `-w' > > `--width=COLS' > > Assume the screen is COLS columns wide. The default is taken from > > the terminal settings if possible; otherwise the environment > > variable `COLUMNS' is used if it is set; otherwise the default is > > 80. > > Fedora 8 has the same wording in "info ls". Possibly Bruce was reading > the man page, which is not as complete (and admits it). Oh, you are looking at info. That makes sense now. > Experimentation on OS X (BSD clone) shows that its "ls" believes COLUMNS > in preference to ioctl, so there's clearly scope for argument; but on > the whole I think we should follow the GNU behavior. The BSD version's > behavior is full of enormous amounts of historical cruft (and its man > page admits that) --- I suspect the behavior on this point "just grew" > instead of being carefully thought about. Well, the GNU 'ls' behavior, because it does not check for isatty(), will use COLUMNS mostly for file/pipe output because those are the cases where ioctl() fails. Is that what you want? -- Bruce Momjian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com + If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. + -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers