Deprecating ps(1)s -w switch

[Alexey Shuvaev]

On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 03:40:54AM -0700, Brian Somers 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.
> 
Do you want to remove '-w' switch preserving '-ww' one? IMO this seems awkward.
Also, by ignoring it for now do you mean that behavior of ps with '-w'
switch would be the same as without it? I would prefer that '-w' == '-ww'.
One can remove all references to multiple 'w' switches from the man page
but leave ps itself insensitive to any number of 'w' switches
(so '-w' == '-ww' == '-www' == ...).
This also would be consistent with (for example)
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=ps&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=Red+Hat+Linux%2Fi386+9&format=html

> Does anyone have any objections to doing this?  I don't propose
> merging this back into stable/8.
> 
0.02$,
Alexey.