Format output to a specific line length

Question

So I have some output that has very long lines, and I want to have it formatted to lines no more than 80 columns wide, but I don't want to split words because they are in the column limit.

I tried

sed 's/.\{80\}/&\n/g'

but has the problem of splitting words and making some lines begin with a space.

I managed to do it with Vim, setting textwidth to 80, going to the beginnig of the file and executing gqG to format the text. But ¡ would rather do it with sed, awk or something similar to include it in a script.

@Celada Because I didn't know of its existence :) – Msegade Jul 23 '14 at 11:22 — Msegade, Jul 23 '14 at 11:22

score 17 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 17 '16 at 16:38

17

Use fold as follows:

fold -s -w80 file

This will only split at whitespace (-s), using a line width of 80 characters (-w80). So it does exactly the same as the fmt solutions, but it also allows to break at any character when omitting the -s option.

answered Oct 17 '16 at 16:38

tanius

874

2

This is the best answer considering fmt merges separate lines by eating new lines. – Jul 26 '18 at 01:10

score 13 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 23 '14 at 11:17

13

Use fmt instead:

fmt --width=80 file

From man fmt:

-w, --width=WIDTH
              maximum line width (default of 75 columns)

answered Jul 23 '14 at 11:17

cuonglm

153,898

score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 23 '14 at 11:19

3

Below mentioned solution might help:

cat file_name.txt | fmt -w 80 > reduced_file_name.txt

fmt - simple optimal text formatter.

answered Jul 23 '14 at 11:19

Anshul Patel

651
5
11

5

Use less of cat: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_(Unix)#Useless_use_of_cat – cuonglm Jul 23 '14 at 11:20

Format output to a specific line length

3 Answers3