Question regarding COLUMNS setting...

[Larry D. Weiner]

I have just built emacs 21.3 on HP-UX. When I try to
do a compile from various frames, I find that the
compilation mode has set the environment variable
COLUMNS, which the compiler then uses to format it's
output. The COLUMNS is set from the frame that I issue
the compile-command. However, I have compilation set
in my special-display-buffer-names variable, so the
column-width is completely irrelevant for any other
frame. The upshot is that this interferes with the
interpretation of compile errors. Is there a way to
suppress COLUMNS from being set?