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.\"     Gunnar Ritter.  All rights reserved.
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.\"	from 4.3BSD fmt.1	6.1 (Berkeley) 4/29/85
.\"
.\" from FMT 1 "April 29, 1985"
.TH FMT 1 "5/6/03" "Heirloom Toolchest" "User Commands"
.SH NAME
fmt \- simple text formatter
.SH SYNOPSIS
\fBfmt\fR [\fB\-c\fR] [\fB\-s\fR] [\fB\-w\ \fIwidth\fR | \fB\-\fIwidth\fR]
[\fIfile\ ...\fR]
.SH DESCRIPTION
.I Fmt
is a simple text formatter which reads the concatenation of input
files (or standard input if none are given) and produces on
standard output a version of its input with lines as close to
72 characters long as possible.  The spacing at the beginning
of the input lines is preserved in the output, as are blank lines
and interword spacing.
.PP
.I Fmt
is meant to format mail messages prior to sending, but may also be useful
for other simple tasks.
For instance,
within visual mode of the
.I ex
editor (e.g.
.IR vi )
the command
.sp
        !}fmt
.sp
will reformat a paragraph,
evening the lines.
.PP
The following options can be used
to alter the behavior of
.IR fmt :
.TP
.B \-c
Select crown margin mode
(for tagged paragraphs).
Paragraphs are separated by empty lines.
The indenting of the first and second line
of each paragraph is preserved,
and following lines are indented
like the second line.
.TP
.B \-s
Split lines,
but do not join lines
(i.\|e. preserve any newline character
found in the input file).
.TP
\fB\-w\fI\ width\fR
Set the length of generated output lines to
.I width
characters.
.SH "ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES"
.TP
.BR LANG ", " LC_ALL
See
.IR locale (7).
.TP
.B LC_CTYPE
Determines the mapping of bytes to characters,
the width of characters,
and the set of word-separating characters.
.SH "SEE ALSO"
nroff(1),
mailx(1),
vi(1)
.SH NOTES
The program was designed to be simple and fast \- for more complex
operations, the standard text processors are likely to be more appropriate.
.PP
The original version of this program was written by
Kurt Shoens.