fold.1 (2010 09)

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fold(1) fold(1)

NAME

fold - fold long lines for ﬁnite width output device

SYNOPSIS

fold [-b][-s][

-w width ][ﬁle ... ]

Obsolete form:

fold [-s][-width ][ﬁle ... ]

DESCRIPTION

The

fold command is a ﬁlter that folds the contents of the speciﬁed ﬁles, breaking the lines to have a

maximum of width column positions (or bytes, if the

-b option is speciﬁed). The fold command breaks

lines by inserting a newline character so that each output line is the maximum width possible that does

not exceed the speciﬁed number of column positions (or bytes). A line cannot be broken in the middle of a

character. If no ﬁles are speciﬁed or if a ﬁle name of

- is speciﬁed, the standard input is used.

The

fold command is often used to send text ﬁles to line printers that truncate, rather than fold, lines

wider than the printer is able to print.

If the backspace, tab, or carriage-return characters are encountered in the input, and the

-b option is

not speciﬁed, they are treated specially as follows:

Backspace The current count of line width is decremented by one, although the count never

becomes negative. Thus, the character sequence character-backspace-character

counts as using one column position, assuming both characters each occupy a sin-

gle column position.

fold does not insert a newline character immediately

before or after any backspace character.

Tab Each tab character encountered advances the column position pointer to the next

tab stop. Tab stops are set 8 columns apart at column positions 1, 9, 17, 25, 33,

etc.

Carriage-return The current count of line width is set to zero.

fold does not insert a newline

character immediately before or after any carriage-return character.

Note that

fold may affect any underlining that is present.

Options

The

fold command recognizes the following options and command-line arguments:

-b Count width in bytes rather than in column positions.

-s Break the line on the last blank character found before the speciﬁed number of

column positions (or bytes). If none are found, break the line at the speciﬁed line

length.

-w width

-width

Specify the maximum line length, in column positions (or bytes if -b is speciﬁed).

The default value is 80. width should be a multiple of 8 if tabs are present, or the

tabs should be expanded using expand before processing by fold (see

expand (1)). The -width option is obsolescent and may be removed in a future

release.

EXTERNAL INFLUENCES

Environment Variables

LC_CTYPE determines the interpretation of text as single- and/or multi-byte characters.

LC_MESSAGES determines the language in which messages are displayed.

LC_CTYPE or LC_MESSAGES is not speciﬁed in the environment or is set to the empty string, the

value of LANG is used as a default for each unspeciﬁed or empty variable. If LANG is not speciﬁed or is

set to the empty string, a default of "C" (see lang (5)) is used instead of LANG.

If any internationalization variable contains an invalid setting,

fold behaves as if all internationaliza-

tion variables are set to "C". See environ (5).

International Code Set Support

Single- and multi-byte character code sets are supported.

HP-UX 11i Version 3: September 2010 − 1 − Hewlett-Packard Company 1