Lo, on Friday, January 11, Craig Dickson did write: > Richard Cobbe wrote: > > > (Just out of curiosity, is the COLUMNS trick documented anywhere? I > > couldn't find it in any of the obvious manpages: dpkg(8), bash(1), > > environ(7).) > > Yes, it actually is in the bash manpage: > > Simple Commands > > A simple command is a sequence of optional variable assignments > followed by blank-separated words and redirections, and > terminated by a control operator. The first word specifies the > command to be executed, and is passed as argument zero. The > remaining words are passed as arguments to the invoked command.
Wrong trick. I meant the special meaning of the COLUMNS environment variable, not the ability to set it on the command line for a single process. Richard
