Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!henry From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards Subject: Re: Disgusting kernel hack Message-ID: <3617@utzoo.UUCP> Date: Sat, 10-Mar-84 19:55:57 EST Article-I.D.: utzoo.3617 Posted: Sat Mar 10 19:55:57 1984 Date-Received: Sat, 10-Mar-84 19:55:57 EST References: <1702@iedl02.UUCP> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology Lines: 40 Brian Beattie observes: What about lines longer than the terminal width. "stty line 80" may not work due to control chars. unless you want "more" in the kernel with the reading of /etc/termcap and all you will always end up with either a partial solution or will be able to handle only one type of terminal. beattie@mitre I hate to tell you folks this, but the kernel is *already* keeping track of what column you're at, so that it can do software-interpreted tab stops properly. I agree that there is a potential problem with the handling of control characters, since the kernel's interpretation of whether a particular character causes a column motion or not is quite simplistic, but in practice this does not get in the way very much. Programs that deliberately emit control characters generally are controlling the terminal directly, in CBREAK or RAW mode, and thus bypass tty-driver pagination altogether. Control characters spilled out onto the terminal by doing something silly like catting a binary file make a horrid mess anyway, and hence are not really an issue. It really isn't a problem, folks. And John Owens follows it up with: And what about whether a terminal wraps or not? I'll stick with the traditional Unix definition of a line - a sequence of characters terminated by a \n. Much more elegant. (And much better than systems like VMS or TOPS-10 with their commands like SET TERM/VT100 !!!) If the terminal doesn't wrap, you simply set the line length to 0 (i.e., "ignore issues of line length"). If it wraps in some strange way, you just give the line length as one character less than it really is, so the terminal's oddities are ignored completely. I know of at least two screen-oriented programs that do this, and few people have ever noticed. -- Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology {allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry