5

I have just installed the latest stable version of FreeBSD to a computer and I have the following problem:

If, in Putty, I issue a command like ps uxa which gives long lines of output, they get cropped. ps uxa|more doesn't help. Even if I do ps uxa > file.txt, lines are cropped to 80 chars in the file!

There are some images of how it looks like: http://yfrog.com/0rfilecroppx

This happens right after clean installation, with everything set to default. Default shell is csh, changing it to bash didn't help. This has never happened to me in Linux.

My uname -a

FreeBSD freebsd.localdomain 8.0-RELEASE FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE #0: Sat Nov 21 15:48:17 UTC 2009 [email protected]:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC i386

How to fix this problem? I have already looked at env vars, .profile, .cshrc, /etc/login.conf.

Improve this question
1
  • What does ps uxa|wc -L tell you? Is the result greater than 80? Also, what does echo $TERM say? Commented Feb 5, 2010 at 20:13

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
2

Try using the -w option:

From the MAN page:

 -w Use 132 columns to display information, instead of the default which is your window size. If the -w option is specified more than once, ps will use as many columns as necessary without regard for your window size. When output is not to a terminal, an unlimited number of columns are always used.
Improve this answer
4
  • Thanks einstiien, but it doesn't solve the problem. This cropping happens with ANY command, ps is just an example. And the most irritating thing is that when I output the result of a command to a file, the lines still get cropped (it is seen at the picture)! Maybe, there's something wrong with the xterm or shell configuration. Commented Feb 5, 2010 at 19:30
  • hmm, I just tested this on my FreeBSD 7.0 box and when I run it with the -w command the lines wrap instead of getting cut off. I am connecting from MacOS X terminal with my emulation set as VT100 (because of some of the older servers I connect to). It might be an emulation issue. Try VT100. I'll play around with putty on a windows box and see what I can come up with. Commented Feb 5, 2010 at 19:36
  • Ok, it works for me through putty with the default putty settings. My freebsd box has $TERM=xterm. I know you said FreeBSD was default but did you change any of the settings in putty? Commented Feb 5, 2010 at 20:25
  • This is just the way BSD ps works (same on open and net as well) - no -w's gets you 80 column, one -w gets you 132, -ww gets you unlimited. It does not matter if the output is redirected to a file. unix.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/FreeBSD/questions/2004-10/… Commented Mar 4, 2010 at 18:06
1

This is a feature/bug of putty, not FreeBSD. putty always tells the other OS what its width and height are. You can show this easily by doing one of your truncating ps commands, then widen the putty screen. You can see that the lines were truncated. Now give the ps comand again: you will see more columns.

In essence, what you are asking putty to do is to lie about the width of your window (giving a number larger than what it really is showing) and to wrap the longer lines intelligently. That will work fine for ps and ls -l and so on, and fail miserably for vi or any other full-screen editor. Such lying can also cause display of information that can be misinterpreted because of the wrapping. There may be a mode of putty that does this, but I could not find it.

Improve this answer
1
  • That shouldn't affect output that's redirected to a file. Commented Feb 16, 2010 at 8:39

You must log in to answer this question.

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.