How to get Linux console window width in Python

Abstraction: Python methods to query terminal console column width at runtime

Key points:

• Python 3.3+ canonical approach: shutil.get_terminal_size() or os.get_terminal_size(); shutil wraps os with fallback but breaks when piping — use os.get_terminal_size(0) with stdin fd to handle pipes
• Pre-3.3 approach: os.popen('stty size', 'r').read().split() gives rows and columns; os.environ["COLUMNS"] is stale after terminal resize
• Low-level approach uses fcntl.ioctl(fd, termios.TIOCGWINSZ, ...) with struct unpack 'hh' (signed) or 'HHHH' (unsigned) depending on platform; must try stdin/stdout/stderr fds in order
• Cross-platform (Linux/macOS/Windows/Cygwin) implementations exist using ctypes for Windows (GetConsoleScreenBufferInfo) and ioctl for POSIX; default fallback is (80, 25)
• Python curses module provides w.getmaxyx() as an alternative; blessings library offers Terminal().width as a high-level wrapper

Connections: Python Programming · Terminal IO

Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/566746/how-to-get-console-window-width-in-python