Re: Readelf: --wide as default if output is redirected

[Fangrui Song <i@maskray.me>]

On Thu, Sep 17, 2020 at 3:36 AM Katharina Bogad via Binutils
<binutils@sourceware.org> wrote:
>
> 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

Yeah, I created an alias 're' for 'readelf -W'. Sometimes I need to
provide a command for others and omitting -W has always caused me
trouble.

To provide a data point, llvm-readelf supports only the wide format
and ignores --wide. It turns out that most projects don't need a
change.