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fmt
: Reformat paragraph text
fmt
fills and joins lines to produce output lines of (at most)
a given number of characters (75 by default). Synopsis:
fmt [option]... [file]... |
fmt
reads from the specified file arguments (or standard
input if none are given), and writes to standard output.
By default, blank lines, spaces between words, and indentation are preserved in the output; successive input lines with different indentation are not joined; tabs are expanded on input and introduced on output.
fmt
prefers breaking lines at the end of a sentence, and tries to
avoid line breaks after the first word of a sentence or before the last
word of a sentence. A sentence break is defined as either the end
of a paragraph or a word ending in any of `.?!', followed by two
spaces or end of line, ignoring any intervening parentheses or quotes.
Like TeX, fmt
reads entire "paragraphs" before choosing line
breaks; the algorithm is a variant of that in "Breaking Paragraphs Into
Lines" (Donald E. Knuth and Michael F. Plass, Software--Practice
and Experience, 11 (1981), 1119--1184).
The program accepts the following options. Also see 2. Common options.
fmt
initially tries to make lines about 7% shorter than this, to give it
room to balance line lengths.
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