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

[Axel Beckert]

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
-- 
 ,''`.  |  Axel Beckert <abe at debian.org>, http://people.debian.org/~abe/
: :' :  |  Debian Developer, ftp.ch.debian.org Admin
`. `'   |  4096R: 2517 B724 C5F6 CA99 5329  6E61 2FF9 CD59 6126 16B5
  `-    |  1024D: F067 EA27 26B9 C3FC 1486  202E C09E 1D89 9593 0EDE