[systemd-devel] How to see full lines with journalctl?

[Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek]

On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 02:04:02PM +0000, Gregory Leon wrote:
> Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek <zbyszek <at> in.waw.pl> writes:
> >
> > journalctl will output full lines when running under a pager,
> > and also when not outputting to a tty. Do you need something
> > different?
> 
> On my machine, running simply "journalctl" starts the pager (less) and the
> lines do not get shortened with the ellipsis but they are still not wrapped
> properly if they are longer than the terminal width. I can only see the rest
> by scrolling horizontally with the arrow keys (which is awful). Running
> "journalctl --no-pager | less" makes them wrap properly, however.
Of course they are not wrapped "properly", since the point is not to wrap
them at all. I don't see anything awful about using arrow keys to move
left and right and up and down. This makes it easy to quickly review
lots of messages, some of which are long, some of which are short,
while making it easy to read the whole message.

> I second the suggestion of getting rid of the whole line-cutting/shortening
> black magic by default and reserve it for a flag. The non-wrapping behaviour
> should never happen and I suspect it's a bug since I can't even find
> anything like it in less' manpage.
Try 'man git diff'.

Different behaviours are good at different times and for different
people... This one (paging by default) is used quite sucessfully in
some modern tools.

Zbyszek