Readelf: --wide as default if output is redirected
Katharina Bogad
katharina@bogad.at
Thu Sep 17 10:36:29 GMT 2020
Hi Nick,
> Which version of readelf ?
2.31 and 2.24. I am kind of stuck with the latter one because it belongs to
an embedded systems development SDK I have no control over.
> I added a new feature to the 2.35 release so that by default readelf will
> suffix truncated symbol names with "[...]", thus letting the reader know
> that the name has been abbreviated.
Yeah, that at least makes it obvious. Thank you!
> Yeah, I think that changing the default behaviour like this would be a bad
> idea. But of course you can always create a wrapper script that adds the --wide
> option (and maybe invokes the pager at the same time).
Well, my argument would be that redirection is good for basically three
things:
- archival
- automated processing
- reading in a pager
Truncating the output IMO does not add value in any of these cases; with
the obvious exception being pagers that can’t be configured to not wrap lines.
In fact, I’d make the argument that it is counter-productive for archival and
automated processing (you’d have to pass --wide anyways to get accurate
results, and it was definitely a gotcha for me, making the behaviour non-
obvious). Maybe I am missing something, but I can’t think of a use-case
where truncating would add value besides viewing in a width-restricted
terminal.
But really, I’m fine either way. Future me will thank you for the dots once I
forget that --wide is a thing and binutils >=2.35 has hit my toolchains.
Best,
Katharina
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