fmt

fmt fills and joins lines to produce output lines of (at most) a given number of characters.

• GNU Coreutils Project Homepage [EN]

• GNU Coreutils [EN] @ Homebrew Formula

• fmt [EN] @ Wikipedia

Documentation

• fmt [EN] @ GNU Coreutils Manual

• man 1 'fmt'
  • BSD [EN]
  • GNU [EN]

Syntax

fmt [PARAMETER ...] [FILE ...]

Parameters

General

The following parameters can be used with all version of fmt:

NOTE:

The BSD version only supports the short form (e.g. -w) of these parameters!

-WIDTH, -w WIDTH, --width=WIDTH

Fill output lines up to WIDTH characters (default 75).

BSD

The following parameters can be used with the BSD version of fmt:

-s

Collapse whitespace inside lines, so that multiple whitespace characters are turned into a single space. (Or, at the end of a sentence, a double space.)

GNU

The following parameters can be used with the GNU version of fmt:

-u, --uniform-spacing

One space between words, two after sentences.

Examples

Scale to unit

fmt --width=50 <<EOT
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua.
EOT

Output:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing
elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt
ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed
diam voluptua.