Am Dienstag, 29. April 2008 schrieb Bruce Momjian:
> Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> > Am Dienstag, 29. April 2008 schrieb Bruce Momjian:
> > > We do look at COLUMNS if the ioctl() fails, but not for file/pipe
> > > output.
> >
> > This is quite a useless complication. Readline uses exactly the same
> > ioctl() call to determine the columns, so if ioctl() were to fail, then
> > COLUMNS would be unset or wrong as well.
>
> I was thinking about Win32 or binaries that don't have readline.
These rules don't seem very consistent. You are mixing platform dependencies,
build options, theoretical, unproven failures of kernel calls, none of which
have anything to do with each other. For example, if readline weren't
installed, then there would be no one who sets COLUMNS, so why look at it?
If you want to allow users to set COLUMNS manually (possibly useful, see Greg
Stark's arguments), then it should have priority over ioctl(), not the other
way around.