fmt

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

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.)

-width

Create lines no longer than width; default is 72 columns.