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45.6. Formatting Plain Text: pr
The line printer spooler (Section 45.2) prints what you send it. If you send it a
continuous stream of text (and the printer is set up to print text
files rather than PostScript), that's probably just
what you'll get: no page breaks, indenting, or other
formatting features.
That's where pr comes in.
It's a simple formatter that breaks its input into
"pages" that will fit onto a
66-line page. (You can change that length.) It adds a header that
automatically includes the date and time, the filename, and a page
number. It also adds a footer that ensures that text
doesn't run off the bottom of the page.
This is just what you want if you are sending program source code or
other streams of unbroken text to a printer. For that matter,
pr is often very handy for sending text to your
screen. In addition to its default behavior, it has quite a few
useful options. Here are a few common options:
- -f
-
Separate pages using formfeed character (^L) instead of a series of
blank lines. (This is handy if your pages
"creep" down because the printer
folds some single lines onto two or three printed lines.)
- -hstr
-
Replace default header with string str. See
Section 21.15.
- -ln
-
Set page length to n (default is 66).
- -m
-
Merge files, printing one in each column (can't be
used with -num and -a). Text is
chopped to fit. See Section 21.15. This is a
poor man's paste
(Section 21.18).
- -sc
-
Separate columns with c (default is a tab).
- -t
-
Omit the page header and trailing blank lines.
- -wnum
-
Set line width for output made into columns to
num (default is 72).
- +num
-
Begin printing at page num (default is 1).
- -n
-
Produce output having n columns (default is 1).
See Section 21.15.
Some versions of pr also support these options:
- -a
-
Multicolumn format; list items in rows going across.
- -d
-
Double-spaced format.
- -ecn
-
Set input tabs to every nth position (default is
8), and use c as field delimiter (default is a
tab).
- -F
-
Fold input lines (avoids truncation by -a or
-m).
- -icn
-
For output, replace whitespace with field delimiter
c (default is a tab) every
nth position (default is 8).
- -ncn
-
Number lines with numbers n digits in length
(default is 5), followed by field separator c
(default is a tab). See also nl
(Section 12.13).
- -on
-
Offset each line n spaces (default is 0).
- -p
-
Pause before each page. (pr rings the bell by
writing an ALERT character to standard error and waits for a
carriage-return character to be read from /dev/tty (Section 36.15).)
- -r
-
Suppress messages for files that can't be found.
Let's put this all together with a couple of
examples:
-
Print a side-by-side list, omitting heading and extra lines:
pr -m -t list.1 list.2 list.3
-
Alphabetize a list of states; number the lines in five columns.
sort states_50 | pr -n -5
If you have an old pr that
doesn't support -n, you can use
cat -n (Section 12.13) to supply the line numbers:
sort states_50 | cat -n | pr -5
-- TOR
| | |
45.5. Using Symbolic Links for Spooling | | 45.7. Formatting Plain Text: enscript |
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