FOLD(1)

📦
version 9.10 · 5 versions
, in ubuntu stonking

✨ FOLD(1) ✨

okay bestie, welcome to fold — the manual page, the moment, the whole vibe 💅 she lives in the GNU coreutils neighborhood and honestly? she's the friend who quietly keeps everyone's text from going off the rails. no cap.

🦋 NAME 🦋

fold — wrap each input line so it fits in the width you specified ✨

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

fold [OPTION]... [FILE]...

that's it. that's the whole girl. <italic>OPTION</italic>s and <italic>FILE</italic>s, as many as you want, in any order, she said periodt 👑

🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

So what she actually does: she takes the input lines inside every <italic>FILE</italic> you hand her and wraps them, then writes all of it out to standard output. Gorgeous. Effortless. Iconic 🌈

If you give her no <italic>FILE</italic>, or if <italic>FILE</italic> is literally just -, she reads from standard input instead. Lowkey a legend for that 🫶

heads up bestie: mandatory arguments to long options are also mandatory for the short options too. so don't come for her with a half-finished flag and expect it to slay. it will not 😭

💖 OPTIONS 💖

every single one, no skips, we're not doing that here ✨

  • -b, --bytes — count bytes instead of columns
  • -c, --characters — count characters instead of columns
  • -s, --spaces — break after blanks, or in words that are bigger than WIDTH 💀
  • -w, --width=WIDTH — use WIDTH columns instead of the default 80
  • --help — display this help and exit 🎀
  • --version — output version information and exit ⭐

🌟 AUTHOR 🌟

Written by David MacKenzie. king behavior honestly 👑

🙈 REPORTING BUGS 🙈

Found a lil glitch? tell the devs, not the group chat:

🧚 SEE ALSO 🧚

Full documentation is over at https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/fold — or you can get it locally with:

info '(coreutils) fold invocation'

This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. (like, genuinely no warranty bestie, do not @ her if something breaks 😭)

💖 and that's the whole page! 💖 this was GNU coreutils 9.10, dated August 2026, filed under FOLD(1) — go wrap some lines and be the main character you were born to be ✨🎀🦋

📦 where this page comes from