Deprecating ps(1)s -w switch

[Jonathan McKeown]

On Tuesday 25 August 2009 15:44:47 Ed Schouten wrote:
> * Brian Somers <brian at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
> > I recently closed bin/137647 and had second thoughts after Ivan (the
> > originator) challenged my reason for closing it.
> >
> > The suggestion is that ps's -w switch is a strange artifact that can
> > be safely deprecated.  ps goes to great lengths to implement width
> > limitations, and any time I've seen people not using -ww has either
> > been a mistake or doesn't matter.  Using 'cut -c1-N' is also a great
> > way of limiting widths if people really want that...
> >
> > I'd like to propose changing ps so that width limits are removed and
> > '-w' is deprecated - ignored for now with a note in the man page
> > saying that it will be removed in a future release.
> >
> > Does anyone have any objections to doing this?  I don't propose
> > merging this back into stable/8.
>
> So ps(1) output can never be limited to the screen width?

I usually want to see ps(1) output in easily-read columns. Without width 
limits, this can't be guaranteed.

I would strongly object to the complete removal of any option to limit the 
output width of ps(1) and make it easily human-readable.

I'm also astonished at the suggestion that not using -ww is ``a mistake''. I 
very seldom need to see the whole commandline for every process.

Jonathan