journalctl chops lines longer then screen

How to disable the chopping of long lines when invoking

journalctl -b 

in order to see the whole journal message ?

E.g. the line get truncated:

Jul 09 20:47:57 myubuntu org.kde.kglobalaccel[1452]: Invalid Context= "Legacy" line for icon theme: "/usr/share/icons/Adw>

1 Answer

This can be simply done by setting the SYSTEMD_LESS environment variable.

For instance setting SYSTEMD_LESS=FRXMK (that means S should not be in the set ) will show the message in a wrapped format.

This can be set in your .bashrc (export SYSTEMD_LESS=FRXMK) or directly in front of the journalctl command:

SYSTEMD_LESS=FRXMK journalctl -b

The output should now be wrapped:

Jul 09 20:47:57 myubuntu org.kde.kglobalaccel[1452]: Invalid Context= "Legacy" line for icon theme:
"/usr/share/icons/Adwaita/8x8/legacy/"

More about setting the SYSTEMD_LESS variable can be found in less(1) and journalctl(1).

From less(1) :

-S or --chop-long-lines

Causes lines longer than the screen width to be chopped (truncated) rather than wrapped. That is, the portion of a long line that does not fit in the screen width is not shown. The default is to wrap long lines; that is, display the remainder on the next line.