fmt Command Examples

Reformat a text file by joining its paragraphs and limiting the line width to a number of characters (75 by default). More information: https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/fmt-invocation.html.

• Reformat a file:

fmt {{path/to/file}}

• Reformat a file producing output lines of (at most) n characters:

fmt -w {{n}} {{path/to/file}}

• Reformat a file without joining lines shorter than the given width together:

fmt -s {{path/to/file}}

• Reformat a file with uniform spacing (1 space between words and 2 spaces between paragraphs):

fmt -u {{path/to/file}}