cat file with no line wrap

Question

In *nix, how do I display (cat) a file with no line-wrapping: longer lines should be cut such that they fit into screen's width.

Answer 1

You may be looking for fmt:

fmt file 

This pretty aggressively reformats your text, so it may do more than what you want.

Alternatively, the cut command can cut text to a specific column width, discarding text beyond the right margin:

cat file | cut -c1-80 

Another handy option is the less -S command, which displays a file in a full screen window with left/right scrolling for long lines:

less -S file 

Answer 2

Note that cut accepts a filename as an argument.

This seems to work for me:

watch 'bash -c "cut -c -$COLUMNS file"' 

For testing, I added a right margin:

watch 'bash -c "cut -c -$(($COLUMNS-10)) file"' 

When I resized my terminal, the truncation was updated to match.