Aidan Van Dyk wrote: > I have to admit to using the COLUMNS=... <command> trick myself. > > I do have COLUMNS exported in my terminal, and often to stuff like: > > ls -C | less > > and I expect it to wrap at $COLUMNS (my terminal width) in my pager. > > And since the GNU coreutils is pretty consistent in this regard, I often > export COLUMNS=<xxx> in scripts for cron jobs, reports, etc, to get > output that formats nicely for emails, etc.
Interesting. > If I ever wanted the psql wrapped format, I guess *I* would hope that > psql would work that way, simply because that's the way the other tools > I use do it. But I can see that if the other tools work differently, > then there is going to have to be some people (maybe everybody) always > double-checking the psql man page to find out again how it formats. True. > But since I'm not a user wanting the wrapped format, don't cater to my > hypothetical wants. > > But one of the interesting things is that psql has an is *interactive* > mode (something the GNU utils don't have to worry about). So *when* you > choose to figure out your columns is important, and really impacts > behaviour too. > > For instance, if I was doing a query, I often to it interactively first: > SELECT [...] FROM [....] LIMIT 50; > And when I'm sure I have the right values,expressions, column aliases, > etc, I do: > \o /tmp/output > SELECT [...] FROM [...]; > \o > And in this case, I would expect that /tmp/output would have identical > formatting to the LIMITed query I just ran interactively, not matter > what setting I had for format/wrapped/auto/$COLUMNS. The only thing we could do there perhaps is to have psql wrap file output to the terminal width if outputting to a pipe/file, but only from an interactive session, but that is just too odd. If we make psql too automatic it will be hard to explain and have more surprises. > `-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. I just looked at coreutils-6.9 and 5.97 and neither manual has a mention of COLUMNS. Seems this is some Debian manual addition or something. I don't see it on Ubuntu 7.10 either. > That's pretty straight forward, pretty explicit, and matches the > description of what Greg has been saying all along. Agreed. The problem is I have a pretty even split on how this feature should behave so we have go to with the majority and adjust as we get feedback from the field. -- 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
