Sounds like you need to loop through a bunch of files and process each separately... so: $!/bin/bash cd /path/to/archives/ for $f in $(find . -name *.html) do fmt -s $f > $f.out mv $f.out $f # rename back to original name done Untested. But this is basically what you want to do. And it's a good sort of structure to pick up on. You'll use it often. hth, ken On 04/09/2012 01:09 PM James B. Byrne wrote: > CentOS-6.2 > > I am investigating how to split long lines present in a > Mailman generated html archives. Mailman places the email > bodies within<pre></pre> tags and some users have MUAs > that send entire paragraphs as one long line. > > I have looked at fmt and fold but these assume a pipeline > from stdout to a fixed filename, which presumably is best > done at the time of the original file's creation. I am > looking for a way to deal with multiple existing files in > a batch fashion so that the reformatted file is written > back out to the same file name oin the same location. > > I cannot seem to hit upon a way to get this to work using > find, xargs and fmt (or fold). Nor can I seem to find an > example of how this might be done using these utilities. > > What I would like to discover is the functional equivalent > of this: > > find /path/to/archives/*.html -print | xargs -I {} fmt -s > {}> {} > > This syntax does not work of course because the xargs file > name substitution only occurs once in the initial argument > list of the following command. But, this example does > describe the effect I wish to obtain, to have the original > file name receive the reformatted contents. > > _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos