Take the tour ×  I'd like to view the last few lines of a file,
but I want the columns aligned. Basically, I want to disable
wordwrap.  This is straightforward with:  tail $FILE | cut -c
-80  But I'm trying to generalize my script for other users, and
I'd like to cut to the actual terminal width, which I can get
with:  stty size | cut -d" " -f2  So I would imagine that I
could just  tail $FILE | cut -c -`stty size | cut -d" " -f2`
but it doesn't work:  stty: standard input: Invalid argument
cut: invalid range with no endpoint: - Try `cut --help' for more
information.  (Same results with the 'new' $() expansion.)  Now,
if I echo it, it seems fine:  echo cut -c -`stty size | cut -d"
" -f2` cut -c -103  Am I just missing an escape char? Or is this
somehow just not possible?   share|improve this question add
comment  2 Answers  up vote 2 down vote accepted  The reason
that it doesn't work is because stty is executed within a pipe.
Therefore it doesn't "see" the underlying terminal. In your
script you could store