Unix in a Nutshell, 4th Edition

Name

fmt

Synopsis

    fmt [options] [files]

Fill and join text, producing lines of roughly the same length. (Unlike nroff, the lines are not justified.) fmt ignores blank lines and lines beginning with a dot (.) or with “From:”. The emacs editor uses ESC-q to join paragraphs, so fmt is useful for other editors, such as vi. The following vi command fills and joins the remainder of the current paragraph:

    !}fmt

Solaris Options

-c

Don’t adjust the first two lines; align subsequent lines with the second line. Useful for paragraphs that begin with a hanging tag.

-s

Split long lines but leave short lines alone. Useful for preserving partial lines of code.

-w n

Create lines no longer than n columns wide. Default is 72. (Can also be invoked as - n for compatibility with BSD.)

GNU/Linux Options

-c, --crown-margin

Crown margin mode. Do not change indentation of each paragraph’s first two lines. Use the second line’s indentation as the default for subsequent lines.

-pprefix, --prefix=prefix

Format only lines beginning with prefix.

-s, --split-only

Suppress line-joining.

-t, --tagged-paragraph

Tagged paragraph mode. Same as crown mode when the indentations of the first and second lines differ. If the indentation is the same, treat the first line as its own separate paragraph.

-u, --uniform-spacing

Reduce spacing to a maximum of one space between words and two between sentences.

-wwidth, --width=width

Set output width to width. The default is 75.

Mac OS X Options

-c

Center each line of text. Most other options are ...