How to prevent "iptools ss" from soft-wrapping long lines on stdout?

Question

I'm far used to the output of netstat -taulpen, and although I don't know what all the flags do specifically, it gives a nice readable table of networking programs, and when run as sudo can show all process names inline with the address and socket they listen on etc.

With ss I get close with:

$ ss -tlnp

  -n, --numeric    don't resolve service names
  -l, --listening  display listening sockets
  -p, --processes  show process using socket
  -t, --tcp        display only TCP sockets

As you can imagine this gives output like this: I've manually wrapped the lines as they appear in the terminal output:

State      Recv-Q Send-Q                                  Local Address:Port                                    Peer Address:Port 
LISTEN     0      50                                                  *:139                                                *:*      
users:(("smbd",874,33))
LISTEN     0      5                                           127.0.1.1:53                                                 *:*      
users:(("dnsmasq",1528,5))
LISTEN     0      128                                         127.0.0.1:631                                                *:*      
users:(("cupsd",782,11))

So my problem is I have a lot of space in my terminal emulator, but ss is very firm on wrapping the first few columns to 100% width, and the remaining columns fall off and wrap, even though there is no literal newline shown in xxd.

Answer 1

1) Pipe though a program that strips the tty width context, like cat

$ ss -tlnp | less
$ ss -tlnp | cat
State      Recv-Q Send-Q        Local Address:Port          Peer Address:Port 
LISTEN     0      50                        *:139                      *:*      users:(("smbd",874,33))
LISTEN     0      5                 127.0.1.1:53                       *:*      users:(("dnsmasq",1528,5))
LISTEN     0      128               127.0.0.1:631                      *:*      users:(("cupsd",782,11))

---

2) Lie about your tty width with stty:

I don't consider this a solution because it involves manually modifying the environment to achieve an effect in a program's context.

But this does work, thought I will never bother to use it:

# Tell the environment this terminal is only 80 chars wide
# (or however slim you need to view the overflow)
$ stty cols 80

$ ss -tlnp
State      Recv-Q Send-Q        Local Address:Port          Peer Address:Port 
LISTEN     0      50                        *:139                      *:*      users:(("smbd",874,33))
LISTEN     0      5                 127.0.1.1:53                       *:*      users:(("dnsmasq",1528,5))
LISTEN     0      128               127.0.0.1:631                      *:*      users:(("cupsd",782,11))