get the terminal's size

Mon Jan 14 07:33:06 EST 2019

Alex Ternaute wrote:
> Hi there,
>> I want to know the number of columns of the terminal where python2 writes
> it's outputs.
>> In a terminal, I type
> $ echo $COLUMNS
> 100
>> But in Python, os.getenv("COLUMNS") gets nothing.
> It gets nothing as well if I try to read the output of "echo $COLUMNS"
> from a subprocess.
>> I feel that I'm missing something but what ?

$ python -c 'import os; print os.environ["COLUMNS"]'
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
 File "/usr/lib/python2.7/UserDict.py", line 23, in __getitem__
 raise KeyError(key)
KeyError: 'COLUMNS'
$ export COLUMNS
$ python -c 'import os; print os.environ["COLUMNS"]'
157
If you see similar output consider adding
export COLUMNS LINES
to your .bashrc or equivalent.
> Looking on the internet for a hint, I see that python3 has an
> os.get_terminal_size().
> Please, is there something similar for python2 ?
>> Cheers