How to prevent --output table shifting from horizontal listing to vertical listing

[adamency]

Here is an illustration of the behavior on my laptop:

~> aws ec2 describe-instances --query "Reservations[].Instances[].{Name: Tags[?Key == 'Name'].Value | [0], Id: InstanceId, PublicIP: PublicIpAddress, Type: InstanceType}" --output table
--------------------------------------------------------------
|                      DescribeInstances                     |
+----------------------+-------+-----------------+-----------+
|          Id          | Name  |    PublicIP     |   Type    |
+----------------------+-------+-----------------+-----------+
|  i-0fe5cf42d3ad596e3 |  None |  99.99.99.16    |  t2.micro |
+----------------------+-------+-----------------+-----------+

~> aws ec2 describe-instances --query "Reservations[].Instances[].{Name: Tags[?Key == 'Name'].Value | [0], Id: InstanceId, State: State.Name, Key: KeyName, PublicIP: PublicIpAddress, Type: InstanceType}" --output table
-------------------------------------
|         DescribeInstances         |
+-----------+-----------------------+
|  Id       |  i-0fe5cf42d3ad596e3  |
|  Key      |  windows-ec2          |
|  Name     |  None                 |
|  PublicIP |  99.99.99.16          |
|  State    |  running              |
|  Type     |  t2.micro             |
+-----------+-----------------------+

How to prevent this dynamic behavior and force the table output to be horizontal ?

All the more when it is apparently dependent on resolution since the same second command outputs in vertical list on my desktop, which means you get different behavior for the same exact command depending on your device.

[aBurmeseDev]

Hi @adamency, thanks for reaching out.
The redirection is caused by the condition where the width of the output table is greater than the width of the terminal as mentioned here. This behavior is by design and only occurs when there’s only one row in the output table.