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fold, fmt

Similar in intent, but fmt is the more powerful of the two.

The purpose is to reformat lines to fit a fixed width output device, and to do it intelligently so that lines are broken at appropriate places rather than mid wo
rd (like that).

Within vi, you can simply do ":.!fmt" to fix an unruly paragraph, or ":1,$!fmt" to do the entire document. That's simple usage, "fmt" has many useful options.

Of course, "fmt file | lpr" can also be useful.


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© Tony Lawrence



Thanks for the tip! No more 'fold' for me - 'fmt' works much better when printing README files to the printer!

- Bruce Garlock



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