Re: more of that sed "editing" (Re: ASCII Formatter Whose Name I've Forgotten)
On Wed, Sep 26, 2007 at 08:27:34PM +0000, Oleg Verych wrote:
> 26-09-2007, Celejar:
> > On Wed, 26 Sep 2007 09:47:09 -0500
> > Martin McCormick <martin@dc.cis.okstate.edu> wrote:
> >
> >> I remember reading about a UNIX utility whose name
> >> escapes me. You feed it ASCII text and it breaks lines as near
> >> to a desired length as possible without splitting words. Anyone
> >> remember the name of this utility?
> >
> > fmt -w nnn?
>
> Yesterday, when i was (quickly) reviewing (very long) backlog of this
> ML, there was similar question, but person started subject with `sed`.
>
> Eventually the sed solution to the problem was not noticed, and this
> silly `fmt` was accepted.
>
> Just in case somebody is interested in sed scripting, i'd like to share
> with little one, which i used to format `pdftotext` output. I didn't come
> up with good distribution algo for justification, though.
>
> <ftp://flower.upol.cz/upload/sed-craziness>
>
> Main usage was to read defprogramming.pdf by Ulrich Drepper in my hackish
> non-X environment. But such docs, with silly 2 columns text, are coming out
> very broken. But some formatting for C in sed, is rather useful.
>
> Ah, "silly fmt?", you might say. Yes. It doesn't break line-long
> words. I do this like that:
> "
> barfoobarbarfoobarbarfoobarbarfoobar\
> barfoobarbarfoobar"
>
> :P
Just to toss out another alternative, while I use fmt a lot, par does
some things better, or at least easier. In particular, it can reformat a
paragraph while retaining leading characters, e.g., quoted text in emails.
It my not handle your runaway foobar example very well, though:
$ echo barfoobarbarfoobarbarfoobarbarfoobarbarfoobarbarfoobar | par -w 40
barfoobarbarfoobarbarfoobarbarfoobarbarf
oobarbarfoobar
--
Ken Irving, fnkci+debianuser@uaf.edu
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