[Aptitude-devel] Bug#775671: bug: output of 'aptitude search' behaves differently when piped/redirected

[U.Mutlu]

Axel Beckert wrote, On 01/18/2015 01:21 PM:
> Hi,
>
> thanks for your bug report.
>
> U.Mutlu wrote:
>> why is the output of this
>>    aptitude search coin
>>
>> different than when redirecting the output to a file or a pipe:
>>    aptitude search coin >t.t
>>    aptitude search coin | less -Sn
>>
>> The difference is that the result gets cutted when piping/redirecting.
>
> Looks like being limited to 80 columns which generally sounds like a
> sane default if the environment variable $COLUMNS is not set -- most
> historical (hardware) terminals do have a width of 80 characters.
>
>> The question is: why such an inconsistent and unintuitive behavior?
>
> While using a default value for searches on terminals where the width
> in unknown surely makes sense, but it's non-sense with piping and
> redirecting.
>
> So I consider this a bug and allowed myself to file an official bug
> report via the Debian Bug Tracking System in your name so that this issue
> don't get forgotten and is properly tracked:
>
> https://bugs.debian.org/775671 (Cc'ed)
>
> 		Regards, Axel

Hi Axel,
thanks for the explanation and putting it into the bug tracking system.

Regards,
Uenal