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shelltext-formatting

Shell script to force carriage return to avoid long lines

I have to use a tool (namely, Rez) which processes text but does not allow long text lines; I would like to shorten long lines with a pre-formatting script.

The script I'm looking for is a simple (darwin/unix) shell script which cuts long lines, for instance inserting a carriage return after the 70th character of the line, if the character is a space (any other idea would work, I thing).

Any idea how to do that?

Thanks

Solution

  • the fold utility does the job, with the -s option. Do not forget to set the correct locale setting so that fold does not fail on special characters.

    All my thanks to mvds.