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Date: Wed, 31 May 2006 10:07:48 -0400
From: "Kenneth Nellis" <knellis AT syntek-usa DOT com>
Subject: LINES and COLUMNS not getting updated
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In my Cygwin X-Windows xterm environment, I'm not seeing the LINES and COLUMNS environment variables getting updated correctly after my window is resized. Furthermore, "echo $COLUMNS" and "printenv COLUMNS" don't agree. (I didn't see relevant articles in the archives.)

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 xterm 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 don't seem to be repeatable.
I observe LINES behaving similarly to COLUMNS.

FWIW, I’m using:
Windows XP Professional Ver 5.1 Build 2600 Service Pack 2
Cygwin DLL version 1.5.19
xterm  6.8.2.0(202-1)
xorg-x11-* 6.8.2.0-x
bash 3.1-17(6)
I'm starting my bash session within an xterm window with "xterm -e /usr/bin/bash -l" from a standard startxwin.bat and TERM=xterm.

--Ken Nellis


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