Util for trimming output to terminal width?

Question

When I do

ps aux

The output gets nicely trimmed to the width of my terminal, so that long process descriptions don't take more than one line. However, if I pipe it into anything else, the long lines return.

I realize this is a proper behavior, since ps is no longer outputting to a tty and the entire output might be crucial for processing. What I want is another util that will crop the output back when I'm done.

I want to be able to do something like this:

ps aux | grep -v 'www-data' | nowrap  

nowrap is the imaginary tool which I'm looking for. It will make sure long lines get cropped and not overflow.

Is there something like this?

Answer 1

You can use the cut command to slice the output. For example:

ps aux | grep -v 'www-data' | cut -c-80

This will keep only the first 80 characters of each line. You can of course set that to any width you want.

If using the bash commandline, you could do this:

ps aux | grep -v 'www-data' | cut -c-$COLUMNS

If the output has tabs, then the width may not be computed correctly. expand can turn tabs into spaces:

ps aux | grep -v 'www-data' | expand | cut -c-$COLUMNS

Answer 2

You can crop the output using cut. e.g.

ps aux | grep -v 'www-data' | cut -c1-${COLUMNS}

where ${COLUMNS} provides the current width of the terminal. The resize command can be used to re-generate the current width:

$ resize
COLUMNS=80;
LINES=24;
export COLUMNS LINES;

You could, if you wanted to automate this, wrap this up in a script nowrap:

#!/bin/bash

eval "export $(resize | grep 'COLUMNS=')"
cut -c1-${COLUMNS} -

Answer 3

And in addition to what nagul said, you can use in bash:

tput cols

to get the width:

COLUMNS=$(tput cols)