window resizing not updating COLUMNS and LINES

["Kenneth Nellis" <knellis at syntek-usa dot com>]

(My reply to Christopher Faylor's reply to my original post ["LINES and
COLUMNS not getting updated"] was blocked, I suspect because this thread has
been marked inappropriate for this list. However, as this turns out not to
be an X-Windows/xterm issue after all and because I cannot continue on the
original thread, I start anew, if that's not a problem [and I sure hope it's
not]...)

I'm not seeing the LINES and COLUMNS environment variables getting updated
correctly after resizing my terminal window. This occurs whether I'm using
rxvt or xterm. Furthermore, "echo $COLUMNS" and "printenv COLUMNS" don't
agree. (I didn't see relevant articles in the archives.)

This occurs regardless of how "shopt -s checkwinsize" is set.

It seems to start off working as expected, but soon fails. What seems to
work reliably is the following sequence in a new login shell:
1) export COLUMNS=80
2) printenv COLUMNS; # correctly shows 80
3) # resize window width
4) printenv COLUMNS; # correctly shows new width

Two interesting repeatable anomalies:
1) If I omit step 2, the last step reports 80, regardless of the window
   width; and
2) "echo $COLUMNS" always reports 80, regardless of what printenv reports.

Also, printenv seems frequently to get stuck at the value 94, regardless of
the actual width. This and many other anomalies haven't been repeatable.
I observe LINES behaving similarly to COLUMNS.

FWIW, Iâm using:
Windows XP Professional Ver 5.1 Build 2600 Service Pack 2
Cygwin DLL version 1.5.19
rxvt 2.7.10 or xterm 6.8.2.0(202-1)
bash 3.1-17(6)

--Ken Nellis


--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/