Linux Terminal – How to Set Shell to Wrap Words for Long Commands

command linelinuxpromptterminal

I connect to a Slackware server. When a command is longer than the size of the putty window, the line continues in the same line, and the start of the command disappears as I continue adding to the same command, just putting a "<" at the beginning of the line.

When I work on the Red Hat server, I can see the whole command because the console just adds lines as it needs.

I don't know where I turn on word wrapping. Where can I set the Slackware server to wrap words as my Red Hat server does?
P.S.: Excuse my English.

Best Answer

This may be because you're using bash (or other shell which uses readline) and in your ~/.inputrc (or global /etc/inputrc) you have

set horizontal-scroll-mode On

From man readline:

horizontal-scroll-mode (Off)
When set to On, makes readline use a single line for display, scrolling the input horizontally on a single screen line when it becomes longer than the screen width rather than wrapping to a new line.

Solution: delete the line (the default setting is Off) or explicitly set the option to Off:

set horizontal-scroll-mode Off

Readline uses /etc/inputrc only if ~/.inputrc doesn't exist or cannot be read (~/.inputrc may also $include /etc/inputrc), so even if there's On in /etc/inputrc and you cannot or don't want to change it, you can always overwrite the setting by editing ~/.inputrc.

The change won't automatically affect already running shells. You can reload the config with

bind -f ~/.inputrc

(see this), or change only that setting with

bind 'set horizontal-scroll-mode off'

The readline library will also fall back to horizontal-scroll-mode if the TERM environment variable is set to a terminal name not found in the terminfo database; you can check if that's the case with the infocmp command. See here for how you can remediate the situation.

A similar interface (but displaying the < mark at the right end of the line) is used in some pdksh-derived shells which do not use readline (notably mksh, the default on Android). For that case there's no possible work-around.

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The ANSI escape sequence right before the “@” sign is not enclosed in \[ and \]. Enclose it and should be fine:

PS1='\[\033[0;32m\]\d \t \u\[\e[1;33m\]@\H /\W $ \[\033[1;37m\]'

By the way, what you call “reset-color” is just setting it to white. To actually reset it use \033[0m.

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Non-printable sequences should be enclosed in \[ and \]. Looking at your PS1 it has a unenclosed sequence after \W. But, the second entry is redundant as well as it repeats the previous statement "1;34".

\[\033[01;32m\]\u:\[\033[01;34m\] \W\033[01;34m \$\[\033[00m\]
                  |_____________|               |_|
                         |                       |
                         +--- Let this apply to this as well.

As such this should have intended coloring:

\[\033[1;32m\]\u:\[\033[1;34m\] \W \$\[\033[0m\]
                               |_____|
                                  |
                                  +---- Bold blue.

Keeping the "original" this should also work:

\[\033[1;32m\]\u:\[\033[1;34m\] \W\[\033[1;34m\] \$\[\033[0m\]
                                  |_|         |_|
                                   |           |
                                   +-----------+-- Enclose in \[ \]

Edit:

The reason for the behavior is because bash believes the prompt is longer then it actually is. As a simple example, if one use:

PS1="\033[0;34m$"
       1 2345678

The prompt is believed to be 8 characters and not 1. As such if terminal window is 20 columns, after typing 12 characters, it is believed to be 20 and wraps around. This is also evident if one then try to do backspace or Ctrl+u. It stops at column 9.

However it also does not start new line unless one are on last column, as a result the first line is overwritten.

If one keep typing the line should wrap to next line after 32 characters.

Best Answer

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Edit:

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