Setting sqlplusw.exe screen buffer width in oracle 9i or 10g (winxp)

Question

hi guys,
i need to set my screen buffer width to the length of my linesize.. but i do not want to manually set it everytime i login using sqlplusw.exe
any idea how do i set it as default or automatically set each time i use sqlplusw.exe
something like a login.sql or connect.sql so that i do not need to set it manually everytime..
please advice :)
thanks alot!

Answer 1

what's your record for most consecutive questions
"whitespace" is all the seemingly empty space between the actual data that you are interested in.
for example
COL1          COL2I just put a bunch of white space between "COL1" and "COL2". I could use spaces (ascii 32) or tabs (ascii 9)
set tab on/off controls whether sqlplus (the client executable) uses tabs or spaces to create those gaps on the screen.
that should answer most of your questions.
why does "set tab off work? the real question is why are your tabs wrong. many, many years ago, we didn't have windows. we didn't have graphics. we had CRTs. everything was character mode. and on certain monitors and/or operating systems, you could set the "tab level", or "tab positions". so instead of the tab key indenting to a columns position divisible by 8 (e.g., col 8, 16, 24, 32, etc), it would indent to the positions you had defined. I haven't seen this problem in at least 10 years, since nowadays nobody changes the tab settings (I don't even know if it can be done anymore, or how).
anyway, when the tab positions were NOT every 8 columns, this would screw up sqlplus output, if it used TABS (set tab on, the default). sqlplus (not oracle) lines up the column headings, underscores and data. it does this by keeping track of where everything is, and creating whitespace between the other characters. so if you have two columns (col1 and col2), each varchar2(7), then your output would look something like this
COL1    COL2
A       Bon the heading line, I put "col1", 4 spaces, then "col2". sqlplus assumes that the first tab stop is at column 8. so it COULD output 4 spaces, or it could output "col1", a tab, then "col2". this is 3 less characters being output. keep in mind that back in the dark ages, sending a character to the screen was costly, so removing those 3 extra outputs really added up (between multiple columns, and for multiple lines).
but what if I screw up my tab settings, moving the first tab stop to column 6? then it would look something like this
COL1  COL2
A     Bscrewed up, right. that's what happened to you. your tab stops are wrong, and it's screwing up the tabbing from sqlplus. by turning tab off, sqlplus generates spaces, which are not subjected to your screwed up tab stops.
"set trim off". it trims trailing spaces on each line. and since spaces are tough to see, you won't see a difference. but if you set your linesize to 1000, then you might notice that the results scroll by faster when you "set trim on". if trim is off, then sqlplus right pads each line of output with whitespace (tabs or spaces) to fill up to LINESIZE. or you might not notice a difference at all. really depends on your machine, memory, etc.