Re: list all packages that are installed

[dman <dsh8290@rit.edu>]

On Wed, Jan 16, 2002 at 10:31:47AM -0600, Richard Cobbe wrote:
| 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.

ncurses thing, apparently.  Try 
    COLUMNS=120 mutt
and see how messed up it gets :-).

$ man ncurses
       COLUMNS
            Specify  the  width  of  the  screen  in  characters.
            Applications  running in a windowing environment usu­
            ally are able to obtain the width of  the  window  in
            which  they  are  executing.  If neither the $COLUMNS
            value nor the terminal's screen  size  is  available,
            ncurses  uses  the size which may be specified in the
            terminfo database (i.e., the cols capability).
        [there's more after this too]


-D

-- 

Better a little with righteousness
than much gain with injustice.
        Proverbs 16:8