fold Command on Linux: Wrap Long Lines to a Fixed Width

fold on Linux hard-wraps lines at a character width — useful when pasting log excerpts into tickets, emails, or narrow terminals without scrolling sideways.

Pair with: head & tail,
grep,
column.

Fixed width

Default is 80 columns — override with -w.

fold -w 72 long-lines.txt | head

Break at spaces

-s tries not to split words when possible.

fold -s -w 60 /var/log/syslog | head

Pipelines

Wrap after extracting lines with grep.

grep ERROR huge.log | fold -s -w 100 | less

Not markdown

fold is plain text — use prettier tools for HTML or Markdown rendering.

Quick Reference

• fold -w 80 file
• Word-friendly: fold -s -w 72 file
• Often piped after grep

Related tutorials

• column
• head & tail
• awk & sed

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