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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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Kevin August 19, 2009 at 8:00 am: Ah, this is great for grepping through a corpus of longlines-text, gzcat corpus.txt.gz | fold | grep foo
2 reikred April 18, 2012 at 9:15 pm: I wish fold had an option no to fold lines unless they contain whitespace that provide a natural folding point.
The -s option helps some, but fold will still spli a long URL, for example, when I might not want that.
Perhaps a perl-based fold script is in order….