setting console width when running FreeBSD in VirtualBox

[Dale Scott]

I have a FreeBSD production server and want to create a development-test
server on my Vista laptop using a dump of the production server running in
VIrtualBox. I use Putty to access my production server and can resize the
console by dragging a corner of the Putty window. However, the VirtualBox
console doesn't to be resizeable (i.e. has a fixed 80-column display width).
The problem is when commands can't return useful information because their
console output is truncated at 80 columns (e.g, "ps -faux | grep httpd"
doesn't return anything and incorrectly implies apache isn't running when
the reason is that the output from ps is truncated before getting to grep).

 

Does anyone have a solution to this? I was hoping to avoid modifying the
configuration of the FreeBSD VIrtualBox vm (creating differences between the
production server and the dev-test server), but any solution would be better
than none.

 

Dale