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

[Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek]

On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 03:52:46PM +0100, Gregory Leon wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 3:16 PM, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek <
> zbyszek at in.waw.pl> wrote:
> 
> > 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 can understand that some people might find this useful but it is rather
> unfortunate that if you need raw, complete, unwrapped output, you have to
> use two flags of which one is long (i.e. "--no-pager -a").
Hm, wrapping should be disabled when using a pipe. At least that's what
I see locally.

Also, I'm not sure about -a/-all, since it will give you unprintable
characters... This is not what you want, usually.

> Furthermore, if
> you would like to page this, it becomes "journalctl --no-pager -a | less",
Here 'LESS=-R journalctl' does the trick.

> which is rather cumbersome. This is a rather important use-case since it is
> necessary if you would like to pipe the complete output to any other
> command. I'm not the one to blindly complain about journalctl "not
> following the Unix way", but this seems rather important.

> For what it's worth, I was quite surprised with the shortening and it was
> not at all intuitive how to stop it when I've first encountered it,
> particularly because it only appears *after* you disable the default pager.
Actually, it only appear is you use --no-pager. I guess that
some examples in the manpage could be useful.

Zbyszek