Hey,

I'm working on a script that runs through a bunch of MT940 files, but since I'm pretty new to this stuff I'm using head quite often to make sure I still got the formatting correct.

However, head insists on using about 60 columns for it's output, making it pretty inconvenient to read and understand long lines. Other programs like ls and echo don't show this behaviour, they just go by $COLUMNS which is 180.
Now the best thing I found so far was someone recommending (in a slightly different context) to set the env variable COLUMNS specific to a command, which seemed to work for the problem in question. The set command was something like "COLUMNS = 180 'command_name' -c -b -n 1 > 'command_name'.log"
Now, not only did this not work for me - just went into some loop without output trying that -, on a minor note: I don't even understand the flags here, so could someone tell me in what man or info I could read up on this? Is it somewhere in the maze of the man bash?

Nevermind, my actual problem is: how do I set the number of columns head will use for its output?
Aaaaand ... why does head | echo not work?

Sorry for this being my first post - I'm afraid I'll have to threaten it won't be my last though - and thanks for any help.

Best wishes

//sorry:
running bash version 4.3.46(1)-release

I've never seen the head command show anything but complete lines unless you use the "-c" option to get the first {n} characters rather than counting lines. What does "head --version" show on your system? The head command is not a bash builtin. It is a separate command.

The echo command just echoes its arguments. It does not read from stdin.

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You're probably looking for fold, which can wrap the width to a specific width.

Each small program specializes in one specific task.

head is version 8.25.
I just figured the actual file I'm running head on is formatted that way for reasons beyond my grasp, so I'm just a dummy. I guess I'll have to write me something that kills unnecessary line breaks but respects the MT940 format. So guess I'll read up on regexes. Man this does not feel at all like I'm in a galaxy far far away from what I actually wanted to accomplish.

Thanks for the note on echo!

I see that I probably got the idea reversed. If you want to expand to a specific width you can use fmt

Looks like you will have some fun parsing that MT940 format. Looks to me like a job for perl or awk.

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