[Techtalk] Program to wrap lines

[John Clarke]

On Mon, Sep 29, 2003 at 12:59:14 +0200, Dan Richter wrote:

> Surely there must be a Linux program that inserts line breaks to limit 
> lines to, say, 80 characters. Does anyone know what the magic word is?

apropos (man -k) is a really good way to find these things - it
searches the whatis database for strings.  It took me a couple of
seconds to find what you wanted:

    [johnc at dropbear ~]$ apropos wrap
    CPAN::Nox            (3pm)  - Wrapper around CPAN.pm without using any XS module
    HTML::Parse          (3pm)  - Deprecated, a wrapper around HTML::TreeBuilder
    IO::Wrap             (3pm)  - wrap raw filehandles in IO::Handle interface
    IO::WrapTie          (3pm)  - wrap tieable objects in IO::Handle interface
    Text::Wrap           (3pm)  - line wrapping to form simple paragraphs
    consolehelper        (8)  - A wrapper that helps console users run system programs
    fold                 (1)  - wrap each input line to fit in specified width
    foomatic-gswrapper   (1)  - foomatic wrapper for ghostscript
    ipfwadm-wrapper      (8)  - IP firewall administration
    kbd-compat           (8)  - kbd-compatibility wrapper scripts for Linux Console Tools
    pswrap               (1x)  - creates C procedures from segments of PostScript language code
    
    [johnc at dropbear ~]$ man fold
    FOLD(1)                   User Commands                   FOLD(1)

    NAME
           fold - wrap each input line to fit in specified width

    SYNOPSIS
           fold [OPTION]... [FILE]...

    DESCRIPTION
           Wrap input lines in each FILE (standard input by default),
           writing to standard output.


So, "fold" is the magic word you're looking for.  It even defaults to
the 80 characters that you used as an example :-)


Cheers,

John
-- 
whois !JC774-AU at whois.aunic.net
GPG key id: 0xD59C360F
http://kirriwa.net/john/