Mac nl only takes lines 2048 chars long

Short answer: whichever suits you.

If your Unix background is mainly from Linux, you’re probably used to GNU commands. As you’ve noticed, they can be different from other Unix/Unix-based operating systems. Depending on how complex your scripts are, you can either:

• make simple changes (like using ls -R . instead of ls . -R), which will work in most (if not all) Unix/Unix-based system and not only on GNU-based ones,

• or install the GNU utilities from MacPorts if you think that there’d be too many/complex changes, or if you prefer to stick to the GNU commands you’re already used to.

If you want to take some time and write portable scripts, do it. If you think that’s not worth it, then don’t. Just bear in mind that not every Unix/Unix-based system uses GNU by default.

This has to do with line breaks. Terminal is looking for either a space, or a continuos string of characters to make a line break. In this case the first opportunity it sees to break the line is between the y and the o. The "y" is shown because the last character in an extended line is shown in the last place to hint the user that something is happening there.

Workarounds...

You could try:

echo -e "a \tb \tc \td \te \tf \tg \tyo"

and everything will appear as you'd expect it.

also something like

echo -e "ab\tcd\tef\tgh\tij\tkl\tmn\tyo"

should break between the "k" and "l"

Still this is odd behavior and defiantly worth a bug/radar report