Bug 54195

Summary: ps shouldn't truncate lines when outputing to a pipe
Product: [Retired] Red Hat Linux Reporter: Need Real Name <eli.venter>
Component: procpsAssignee: Daniel Walsh <dwalsh>
Status: CLOSED NOTABUG QA Contact: Aaron Brown <abrown>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 7.1   
Target Milestone: ---   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: i386   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Story Points: ---
Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2004-03-29 12:45:22 UTC Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
Documentation: --- CRM:
Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Need Real Name 2001-10-01 14:15:28 UTC 
From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.4+) Gecko/20010921

Description of problem:
Piping ps to less or to an output file results in lines greater then 80
chars being truncated, even when running in a window with greater then 80
lines of width.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):


How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Start a maximized gnome-terminal
2.run ps e  ps outputs chars to the edge of the screen
3.run ps e > ps.out output truncated at 80 chars
	

Actual Results:  ps output is truncated

Expected Results:  ps should output it's full, untruncated, line of
information.

Additional info:
Comment 1 Alexander Larsson 2002-06-20 13:46:20 UTC 
This is a "historical" issue. Use the -w or w argument to make ps not cut the
output.
Comment 2 Need Real Name 2002-06-20 13:58:38 UTC 
It still doesn't seem like it does the "right" thing. When you have a terminal of 80 chars
it should truncate to 80 chars. When you pipe the output somewhere it should give the
full lines.
Comment 3 Need Real Name 2002-06-20 14:09:50 UTC 
I guess the real point here is it's very strange to have an xterm with 130 columns when
you do ps aux it fills the 130 columns but when you do ps aux | less it truncates to
80 columns.
Comment 4 Alexander Larsson 2002-06-20 14:25:38 UTC 
Not truncating when the output is a pipe sounds reasonable. 
Reopening.
Comment 5 Daniel Walsh 2004-03-26 11:41:48 UTC 
Is this fixed in procps-3.1.15?
Comment 6 Daniel Walsh 2004-03-29 12:45:22 UTC 
Comments from upstream maintainer:

Current behavior differs. There is no correct behavior
though; the old behavior was quite reasonable. Failing
to truncate lines makes "ps auxe | less" look ugly.
Either way, this is a losing situation. Perhaps "ps"
should link against curses so that TERM may be used.

So not a bug.