Wayne Hartell wrote: > I think the file I have simply does not have many line feeds. Is that abnormal for Linux perhaps? You mean such as your reply line above which is a very long line and pushes off the right side of the screen? More typically it would be word wrapped to make reading it easier. Word wrapped like this: > I think the file I have simply does not have many line feeds. Is > that abnormal for Linux perhaps? Search the web for "format=flowed" and you should find much discussion of this issue in regards to email messages. I will start things off with this page. http://joeclark.org/ffaq.html You have a file not a message. But the concepts are the same. Some editors make all paragraphs all on one line with no linefeeds in them. The editor will display and print the file by automatically inserting linefeeds in to format it on the fly. Effectively what you are seeing in the file will be the internal representation from the editor you are using. When the file is a .doc file you rather expect it will not be intelligible without the program. When the file is .txt it still and you can _mostly_ see it but that doesn't mean that aren't still conventions for formatting from the editor. There may even be special formatting characters inserted by the editor to control paragraph breaks and other formatting. If, and only if, this is the issue with your file then you can easily format it from that mode. sed G < infile.txt | fmt > outfile.txt The sed command "G" will double space the file. The fmt command will format it. The file you create on the right should be more "normal". How well the formatting works depends upon the content. If it is pure text then it should look perfect. But some special formatting won't work automatically and some fixup is often required. Bob
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