On 2024/05/20 16:15, Mark Kettenis wrote:
> > Date: Mon, 20 May 2024 14:26:46 +0100
> > From: Kirill A. Korinsky <kirill@korins.ky>
> > 
> > On Mon, 20 May 2024 13:53:15 +0100,
> > Jason McIntyre <jmc@kerhand.co.uk> wrote:
> > > 
> > > i don't know if there's a reason, but if your change goes in, i suggest
> > > simply removing the note from the man page, since it hardly seems worth
> > > noting if we display them all...
> > > 
> > 
> > digging shown that it was a part of original import from NetBSD. NetBSD
> > replaces that 4 into 3 ~20 years ago [1] which was made depends on terminal
> > width [2] which was heavy reworked few years ago [3]
> 
> Right.  The default of 4 is almost certainly chosen such that the
> default output fits on a standard 80 character terminal line.  And
> that is still the only reasonable default.  So the diff should not go
> in.

It doesn't, though - it overflows 80 columns if you have 3 or more drives.

         1         2         3         4         5         6         7         8         9        10
12345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567
$ iostat
      tty                sd0                 sd1                 sd2                 sd3                cpu
 tin tout  KB/t  t/s    MB/s   KB/t  t/s    MB/s   KB/t  t/s    MB/s   KB/t  t/s    MB/s  us ni sy sp in id
   1  601 16.18   28    0.44   0.00    0    0.00   0.00    0    0.00  16.18   28    0.44   2  0  1  0  0 97