[BUG] multiline select behaviour of busybox shell in xterm

John Spencer maillist-busybox at barfooze.de
Thu Feb 28 15:40:00 UTC 2013


On 02/28/2013 04:10 PM, Denys Vlasenko wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 7:25 PM, John Spencer
> <maillist-busybox at barfooze.de>  wrote:
>> everytime i chroot into a busybox environment, i notice a weird behaviour in
>> xterm:
>>
>> 1) selecting text that spans over more than one line using a double-click
>> will only select the half of the text that is in the currently selected line
>>
>> for example, if the terminal width is 10 chars:
>> 12345678 A
>> BCD
>> where ABCD is a complete word without line breaks, double-clicking on A will
>> only select A, whereas using coreutils+bash, ABCD will be selected.
>>
>>
>> 2) the other case is selecting multiple lines, for example a long gcc
>> statement, using the busybox environment the copied text has embedded
>> newline characters on the terminal line boundaries whereas on a typical gnu
>> system it does not.
>>
>> so if you want to copy/paste such a long command to reuse it in another
>> terminal, you have to paste it into an editor first, remove the line breaks
>> and copy it from there again. this is quite annoying.
>
> selecting text is handled by xterms, and unless xterm is trying to be extremely
> clever, it decides about such things as you described merely by looking at
> its current text matrix. I.e. it has no idea how the text ended up there:
> whether there was a line break or not.
>
> In my experience most xterms decide "if the last char on the line
> is not a space and the first one on next line is not a space, then
> assume it was a screen-wrapped word".
>
> On your bbox machine, you might have one which doesn't use
> this heuristic.

the weird thing is, it's the same machine.
it works correctly in the native system, but as soon as i chroot into 
busybox env, the multiline selecting is messed up.
out of the chroot, it again works correctly.


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