Yep, and the result is I have needless sprinklings of "www" in my shell scripts cause of habit. Technically I don't need it the moment I pipe into grep, but oh well ;) Anyway I personally dislike the SysV-like 'I need to add stuff like -aef' to get all that on-the-screen/into-grep vs the BSD-like it knows about TTY but I can convince it otherwise into stuf like 'less -S' - personal taste I guess.
Actually I just found this in the 'ps' manual, it looks like the output width is actually undefined!
"If ps can not determine display width, as when output is redirected (piped) into a file or another command, the output width is undefined (it may be 80, unlimited, determined by the TERM variable, and so on)."
