rxvt line wrapping

[Scott, Steven]

Greetings,
 
I'm having two related problems with how rxvt wraps long command lines.
Consider the small awk program (the first part is my prompt):
 
~/research/multilogit/data/eip-symptom[557]   awk '{for(i=1; i<=3; ++i) printf("%s ", $i)}' longfilename.txt
 
(1) Rxvt wraps the line at some point (presumably column 80) even if the rxvt screen is much wider than 80 columns.  The 'resize' command has no affect on this behavior.
 
(2) when the line wraps, rxvt does not begin a new line.  It overwrites the beginning of the old line, which is very confusing.  
 
As a result, typing my little program in rxvt produces:
 ", $i); printf("\n")}' symptom-sorted.txt] awk '{for(i=1; i<=3; ++i) printf("%s 

Very confusing!!!
Is there something I can do to get better line wrapping behavior?
 
Steve