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

by Vivek Gite · 1 comment

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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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }

1 Kevin 08.19.09 at 8:00 am

Ah, this is great for grepping through a corpus of longlines-text, gzcat corpus.txt.gz | fold | grep foo

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