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Comment by emmelaich | Hacker News Reader

Yep, but I'm curious enough to quiz it.

Weirdly, today I ran wish in MacOS Sequoia (15.1.x) and had the (exception) output truncated at terminal width!

Because macOS closest relative isn't Free/NetBSD, but OSF/1 which, under few different names, was sold by Digital as Unix for Alpha (there were few rare builds for MIPS too).

Interesting, I thought MacOS was basically a FreeBSD variant.

But I just tried it again on a resized terminal window and I couldn't reproduce it!

OSX took in a bit of FreeBSD and NetBSD to modernise sons areas, but the main thing for 10.0 release involved pulling in the latest OSFMK.

Also, several APIs introduced after BSD 4.4 are very visibly missing, pointing to how little was taken from Free/NetBSD

> Because macOS closest relative isn't Free/NetBSD, but OSF/1

What you say here contains some truth (certainly with respect to the kernel), but I doubt that has anything to do with the behaviour the grandparent is reporting–the wish command in Tcl/Tk truncating output at terminal width. That behaviour would be determined by the Tcl/Tk code, nothing inherently to do with the underlying OS.

> but OSF/1 which, under few different names, was sold by Digital as Unix for Alpha (there were few rare builds for MIPS too).

IBM also briefly sold a port of OSF/1 to IBM mainframes, AIX/ESA: it was available to customers in June 1992, and withdrawn from marketing in June 1993–it was discontinued so quickly due to lack of customer interest, and also because IBM was about to release (in 1994) a UNIX compatibility subsystem for MVS (OpenEdition), which was a more attractive UNIX option for many of their mainframe customers.

I believe IBM's abortive Workplace OS – shipped in beta form only as OS/2 PowerPC Edition – was also partially derived from the OSF/1 code base.

I believe the Workplace OS connection was related to the use of Mach microkernel. I knew IBM was looking into at least one use of OSF/1 as shipped Unix, but wasn't sure which one (and AIX by middle 1990s was weird enough to confuse most people...)

dspillett was exactly right: ps, e.g., truncated its output at $COLUMNS and there was no horizontal scroll.

As suggested above, it did this even when called from a script.

The fix was easy, set COLUMNS ridiculously large if DEC Unix, but it took days of WTF apparent UB before I realized how simple was what was happening. It just seemed haphazard: I'd reposition and resize a window so I could run the script in one while manually running the commands in another, get inconsistent results, rinse, repeat...

...and eventually realize the common element in each test was me, and the variations I was introducing were window size.

I cursed their engineers for trying to be "helpful" and keep things "pretty".

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