[TUHS] fmt(1): history, POSIX, -t, -c

Doug McIlroy doug at cs.dartmouth.edu
Fri May 29 11:25:02 AEST 2020


The title of the fmt man page in v9 was "ultra-simple text formatter".
Gnu dropped the "ultra" in favor of AI. Sometimes it does a pretty
job. Sometimes it messes up my typing style. Always it produces a
an apparently wavering right margin, as it assigns a separate
"optimal" line length to each paragraph. It's hard to imagine how
this command could stray from classic Unix simplicity and
intelligibility, but Gnu pulled it off.

Doug


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