"Rod C. Johnson" writes:

I have a text file about 20 characters wide (sometimes a lot more sometimes a lot less) and I want to change the line to about 70 characters.

An example: $ awk '{printf("%-70s\n", substr($1,1,70))};' file

Any hints would be appreciated, as the man pages for sed/grep are rather terse.

I don't think grep can do it. Sed in principle can but not in a straightforward way. -- Alexandr.Malusek@imv.liu.se