ldapsearch and Line Width

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 an LDAP directory 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!