Not Good Enough

OpenLDAP is open source LDAP software. It’s used on a lot of Unix and Linux distributions. ldapsearch is a utility that comes with OpenLDAP. It allows you to search an LDAP directory from the command line. This is potentially very useful when you need to access LDAP from a shell script. You can even use it to access Active Directory, as Phil Lembo shows here.

Unfortunately, when ldapsearch returns its results it wraps the output after 76 characters – and it doesn’t appear to give an option to turn line wrapping off. Now what bright spark thought that this would be a good idea. That makes it a pain in the arse when you’re trying to grep the output of a directory search.

Someone does seem to have come up with a patch back in 1999, but it doesn’t appear to have made it into production.

It’s just not good enough!