bash when inside screen, output is truncated if does not fit in a line

Question

Outside screen -

[j@firedesire rb]$ diff -bu root_es-US.pres root_es-MX.pres | sed -n "s/^-\([^=]*\)=.*/'\1'/p" |  tr "\\n" ","
'IMG.HEAD.LOGO.URL','LNK.COPYRIGHT.URL','LNK.FOOTSECURITY.URL','LNK.HEADHELP.URL','LNK.HEADYAHOO.URL','LNK.PRIVACY.URL','LNK.TOS.URL','STR.HEAD.LOGO.HEIGHT','STR.HEAD.LOGO.WIDTH','REG.TOS.MAIL.URL','UPGRADE.STR.AGREE.STATEMENT',[j@firedesire rb]$

Inside screen -

[j@firedesire rb]$ diff -bu root_es-US.pres root_es-MX.pres | sed -n "s/^-\([^=]*\)=.*/'\1'/p" |  tr "\\n" ","
'IMG.HEAD.LOGO.URL','LNK.COPYRIGHT.URL','LNK.FOOTSECURITY.URL','LNK.HEADHELP.URL','LNK.HEADYAHOO.URL','LNK.PRIVACY.URL','LNK.TOS.URL','STR.HEAD.LOGO.HEIGHT','STR.HEAD.LOGO.WIDTH','REG.TOS.MAIL.URL','UPGR

It gets cut off at 'UPGR where line ends. What could be causing this problem, how can I fix this ?

Answer 1

Your output is wider than your screen

You can force the output to wrap by piping it through less -+S, you'll have to use your arrow keys to view all of the output.

There's an option in screen to toggle wrapping on or off; you may have luck with that as well: https://www.gnu.org/software/screen/manual/html_node/Wrap.html

Answer 2

Another method besides less is to pipe it through cat:

ps aux | cat
top | cat

That won't pause at every screenful, like less or more would do, but when programs would otherwise halt until it receives user input, when they detect that their output is being piped to another process, they just dump out the results and keep going.

I use this a lot with external diff programs attached to my git or svn flags: git diff | cat keeps feeding my diff program all the extra files after the first one, while git diff by itself doesn't.