April 7th 2003: fmt
From UoWiki
% man fmt
FMT(1) OpenBSD Reference Manual FMT(1)
NAME fmt - simple text formatter
SYNOPSIS fmt [[[-cmps]] [[[-d chars]] [[[-l num]] [[[-t num]] [[[goal maximum] [[[name ...]]
DESCRIPTION fmt is a simple text formatter which reads the concatenation of input files (or standard input if none are given) and produces on standard out- put a version of its input with lines as close to the goal length as pos- sible without exceeding the maximum. The goal length defaults to 65 and the maximum to 10 more than the goal length. The spacing at the begin- ning of the input lines is preserved in the output, as are blank lines and interword spacing.
The following options are available:
-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.
-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. number spaces will be replaced with one tab.
-t number Assume that the input files' tabs assume number spaces per tab stop. The default is 8.
fmt 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.
SEE ALSO mail(1), nroff(1)
HISTORY An fmt command appeared in 3BSD.
The version described herein is a complete rewrite and appeared in OpenB- SD 2.4.
BUGS The program was designed to be simple and fast - for more complex opera- tions, the standard text processors are likely to be more appropriate.
When the first line of an indented paragraph is very long (more than about twice the goal length), the indentation in the output can be wrong.
fmt is not infallible in guessing what lines are mail headers and what lines are not.
OpenBSD 2.6 June 6, 1993 2
