The
fmt
utility is a simple text formatter which reads the concatenation of input
files (or standard input if none are given) and produces on standard
output a version of its input with lines as close to the
goal
length
as possible without exceeding the
maximum
The
goal
length defaults
to 65 and the
maximum
to 10 more than the
goal
length.
Alternatively, a single
width
parameter can be specified either by prepending a hyphen to it or by using
-w
For example,
``fmt -w 72
''
``fmt -72
''
and
``fmt 72 72
''
all produce identical output.
The spacing at the beginning of the input lines is preserved in the output,
as are blank lines and interword spacing.
Lines are joined or split only at white space; that is, words are never
joined or hyphenated.
The options are as follows:
-c
Center the text, line by line.
In this case, most of the other
options are ignored; no splitting or joining of lines is done.
-m
Try to format mail header lines contained in the input sensibly.
-n
Format lines beginning with a
`.'
(dot) character.
Normally,
fmt
does not fill these lines, for compatibility with
nroff(1).
-p
Allow indented paragraphs.
Without the
-p
flag, any change in the amount of whitespace at the start of a line
results in a new paragraph being begun.
-s
Collapse whitespace inside lines, so that multiple whitespace
characters are turned into a single space.
(Or, at the end of a
sentence, a double space.)
-d chars
Treat the
chars
(and no others) as sentence-ending characters.
By default the
sentence-ending characters are full stop
(`.'
)
question mark
(`?'
)
and exclamation mark
(`!'
)
Remember that some characters may need to be
escaped to protect them from your shell.
-l number
Replace multiple spaces with tabs at the start of each output
line, if possible.
Each
number
spaces will be replaced with one tab.
The default is 8.
If
number
is 0, spaces are preserved.
-t number
Assume that the input files' tabs assume
number
spaces per tab stop.
The default is 8.
The
fmt
utility
is meant to format mail messages prior to sending, but may also be useful
for other simple tasks.
For instance,
within visual mode of the
ex(1)
editor (e.g.,
vi(1))
the command
!}fmt
will reformat a paragraph,
evening the lines.
ENVIRONMENT
The
LANG , LC_ALL
and
LC_CTYPE
environment variables affect the execution of
fmt
as described in
environ(7).
