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The Ultimate Linux Shell Scripting Guide
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The fmt
utility works by attempting to make all non-blank lines in a text file the same length. Its default action is to set a target length of 75 characters for each line. However, you can change that if your file is either too narrow or too wide to display properly. The slight catch is that it doesn’t work well with every file. If your file has things like tables, indices, or tables of contents, fmt
can mess up their formatting. (That’s ironic, considering that fmt
is short for format.) You would then have to go back and manually edit them to make them look right.
I should point out for all of these examples to work on a virtual machine, you’ll need to have the virtual machine window set to a wider-than-default width. You can do that by opening the Virtualbox View menu for the virtual machine, and selecting the Scaled Mode option. That will allow you to resize the virtual machine window to suit your needs.
Another option is to just...