Re: [gentoo-user] how to word-wrap using a pipe?

[paulcol@andor.dropbear.id.au]

On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 09:13:46AM +0800, zhangweiwu@realss.com wrote:
> Hello. How can I line-wrap a text file that was not wrapped before (e.g.
> like text file created on Microsoft Windows's notepad, the software does
> softwrap by default, thus the file created using it often have very long
> text lines) by using command pipe?
> 
> I could use vim, activate some formatting options and use gq. But that
> couldn't be used on a pipe.
> 
> I could use groff, but that command line looks too complicated:
> 
> $ head -n1 max_payne | groff -Tutf8 | grep --invert-match ^$
> Life was good. A house on the Jersey side across the  river.  The
> smell  of  freshly  cut  lawns. The sounds of children playing. A
> beautiful wife and a baby girl. The American dream come true. But
> dreams  have  a nasty habit of going bad when you’re not looking.
> 
> 
> Besides groff wraps not according to the console term width, but
> according to the paper size in /etc/paper. It would be nice to have
> something wrap my text by using console width (what you get with '$ stty
> -a | head -n1')


$ man -k wrap | fgrep line
Text::Wrap           (3pm)  - line wrapping to form simple paragraphs
fold                 (1)  - wrap each input line to fit in specified width
ggz-wrapper          (6)  - GGZ Gaming Zone command line core client


Hmm, 'fold' looks promising...


$ fold --help
Usage: fold [OPTION]... [FILE]...
Wrap input lines in each FILE (standard input by default), writing to
standard output.

Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too.
  -b, --bytes         count bytes rather than columns
  -s, --spaces        break at spaces
  -w, --width=WIDTH   use WIDTH columns instead of 80
      --help     display this help and exit
      --version  output version information and exit


-- 
Reverend Paul Colquhoun, ULC.    http://andor.dropbear.id.au/~paulcol
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