fold: Wrap Text File / Line / Words To Fit in Specified Width

fold is really nifty command line utility to make a text file word wrap. This is useful for large number of text files processing. There is no need to write a perl / python code or use a word processor.

fold command syntax

fold -sw {COUNT} {input.txt} > {output.txt}

Wrap input lines in each input.txt, writing to standard output.txt.

Where,

• -s: break at spaces
• -w: {COUNT} use COUN} as WIDTH columns instead of default 80.

For example, following command will wrap input.txt at 60 width columns:
$ fold -sw 60 input.txt > output.txt

A large number of files can be processed using for shell loop:

for i in *.txt
do
  fold -sw 65 $i > $i.output
done

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