The "-W|--wide" option?

[Nick Clifton]

Hi Carlos,

> Must all binutils tool output be wrapped to 80 chars
> unless -W|--wide is specified?

No.

The are two main reasons for a tool to have a truncated or wrapped 
output format.  The first is for clarity - sometimes a terse output is 
easier to read.  The second is to help automated parsing of the output, 
in cases where whitespace cannot be relied upon to separate fields.  In 
such cases knowing that a given field starts at a given column number 
can be useful.


> If we wrap, as opposed to truncating, then how does
> one wrap something that is a single block larger
> than 80 characters?

I do not think that there is a standard for how this should be done.
My first suggestion would be to choose a character that would not appear 
in the output line and use this to act as a wrap-has-occurred-here 
character.  If that is not possible, then my second suggestion would be 
to indent the output by one column and then use that first column to 
contain a line-continues-here marker.


> Do we care to indicate that the wrapping has occurred?

Yes.


> I notice that:
> * objdump says it will truncate symbol names without -W.
> * readelf says it will break lines (wrap).
>
> Is the current behaviour a historical matter,

Yes.

 > and changing it would not be acceptable because it might
> break consumers of this output?

Correct.

You are presumably considering altering the default output of one or 
more of these tools.  Adding new, non-default, command line options to 
improve or change the formatting of the output is OK.  Why is this 
important to you ?

Cheers
   Nick