43.8 Fixing Margins with pr and fold

The System V version of pr (43.7 ) has a -F option for folding lines that are too wide for the output page: the printer won't truncate them. If you print lots of random data and stuff that may have long lines and your pr doesn't have -F , try the fold command instead.

fold arbitrarily breaks lines that are too long, by default at 80 columns. Use -width where width is the desired column to fold at for some other breaking point.

I made an alias (10.2 ) and shell function (10.9 ) called prF to do that. It prints a single file and puts the filename in the pr heading (usually, if you pipe to pr , it won't know the filename). You might want to add |   lpr onto the end of this, too:

alias prF 'fold \!^ | pr -h "\!^"'

csh_init sh_init	A good way to see which lines are folded is with line numbering. pr versions without -F usually don't have -n either. You can add it to your alias with cat -n (25.21 ) . The lines will be numbered before they're folded:

alias prnF 'cat -n \!^ | fold | pr -h "\!^"'

To shorten lines by folding them after a word near the right-hand end (instead of at some particluar column), try fmt (35.2 ) .