On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 10:09:19PM +0200, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek wrote:
Yes, this is still the case, that plain 'systemctl' truncates unit names. It's a tough choice, but in this specific case it's hard to find a format that would work without truncation. There are two fields with potentially very long values (unit name and unit description). We can let the second one flow in the right side, but if we left the first one in full width, on normal terminal width of ~100 columns, even this *first* column would not fit. And the truth is that the units which are usually truncated are the device units (they tend to have the longest names), and they are not the most interesting usually. So in this case truncation makes it much nicer to look at the interesting .service and .target units. Truncation has been removed from a few other places, but in this case it just doesn't seem feasible.
The "..." in the middle of the line makes the output completely unusable. On my current machine, I see 6 service units whose names are middle-truncated (it's not just device units). The problem is that there's no way to scroll or adjust the terminal size to get the full output. I would much rather have the description field completely omitted or at least extend off to the right (it's much less essential than the service name anyway).
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