CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxbashcentosyum
bokibeg
bokibeg

Reputation: 2142

How to set output buffer width/columns when outputting to file?

I want to execute yum list installed > file.txt and output results to a txt file which is NOT wrapped by X characters. At least, I want to be able to control "width" of this output buffer.

I know that stty columns 250 will set column width of my console window to 250 characters but how do I accomplish this when I redirect output to a file?

This has certainly been asked before but I just could not find an answer...

Edit:

This seems to be a yum thing since ps aux > ps.txt works just fine. With yum, file is limited to only 80 characters so I'm adding yum tag. I have no idea how can yum give different output on screen and on the file while other programs work just fine (also note that I'm a beginner in bash).

Upvotes: 5

Views: 3175

Answers (2)

harmic
harmic

Reputation: 30597

I stumbled across a hackish way to do this using screen:

screen -L yum --color=never list installed

This will result in a file called screenlog.0 containing the output, and yum will think it is outputting to a TTY with the same width as your current screen.

Upvotes: 4

Peter - Reinstate Monica
Peter - Reinstate Monica

Reputation: 16039

I think you have two options.

  1. Edit the yum source (http://yum.baseurl.org/download/3.4/yum-3.4.3.tar.gz). The 80 is hard coded in output.py, line 53.

  2. It's probably doable to make yum believe it is writing to a terminal. Whether -- and if, how -- it is possible to set the number of columns for that fake terminal I am not sure of. One thing that pops up is Linux' unbuffer (cf. Piping data to Linux program which expects a TTY (terminal)). Perhaps a little self written unbuffer-like C wrapper may use a pty and have more control over it; even bash may have an esoteric feature for that.

Upvotes: 4

Related Questions