Powershell output column width

Question

If i have an exe: out.exe and its stdout is redirected to a file ie:

out.exe > $file

Right now if i do this it only outputs <-----------------------------> 80 columns per line to the file

is there a way to make the standard output to be wider in console column count? is it the out.exe thats somehow messing with the columns.. in my case im using fxcompcmd.exe

Answer 1

Both the out-file and out-string cmdlets have a width parameter:

out.exe | out-file -width 132 -filePath $file

Answer 2

I encountered a similar problem a while back. Here's what I did to fix it:

# Update output buffer size to prevent clipping in Visual Studio output window.
if( $Host -and $Host.UI -and $Host.UI.RawUI ) {
  $rawUI = $Host.UI.RawUI
  $oldSize = $rawUI.BufferSize
  $typeName = $oldSize.GetType( ).FullName
  $newSize = New-Object $typeName (500, $oldSize.Height)
  $rawUI.BufferSize = $newSize
}

It simply sets a new width of 500 characters on the host's RawUI output buffer (though, since we run our build in several environments, and we did not want the script to fail just because it could not make the output a bit larger, the code is rather defensive).

If you run in an environment that always sets RawUI (and most do), the code can be greatly simplified:

$Host.UI.RawUI.BufferSize = New-Object Management.Automation.Host.Size (500, 25)