ps output line length change

[Jamie Landeg-Jones]

Cy Schubert <Cy.Schubert at cschubert.com> wrote:

> That's a tough one. Break Linux compatibility or break BSD 
> compatibility?
>
> Generally Linux users use ps -ef which we don't support and columns are 
> different so, Linux compatibility is... well just isn't.
>
> My vote is to revert and have an environment variable with defaults, 
> e.g., PS=--linux or something similar.

I agree entirely. This change effectively changes the output data simply due to
presence of a pipe.

So, the output of "ps" could be somewhat different to "ps | cat".. (*)

It's a total break of POLA.
It's unnecessary (-ww already exists to achieve it)
And I think it will actually make scripts more unreliable going forward... Which version
of "ps" are we running? Do we "-ww" or not?

Surely we want to remove ambiguity not add it.

I know it's a weird one - I remember long long ago getting bitten by scripts that
parsed "ps" getting seemingly unexplained truncation. But that's when I learnt how
"ps" works, and that's when I learnt of "-ww"

Now, if "ps" had never defaulted to tty-width truncation, then that would be fine,
but changing how it determines to do so now would be awful, in my opinion.

(*) I realise that piped output is often changed to remove control/colour attributes,
and "ls" switches off column mode, but the former is a different situation, and the
latter? Well, something we have to live with now, and it doesn't really affect the
actual raw data that's displayed.

Cheers, Jamie