Hello,

I am currently trying to edit an ldif file. The ldif specification states that a newline followed by a space indicates the subsequent line is a continuation of the line. So, in order to search and replace properly and edit the file, I open the file in textwrangler, search for "\r " and remove it, thus making all continued lines into single lines. Thats the first step. I make my changes to the ldif file at that point.

Now, after editing, I want to break any lines with more than 79 characters, (some of which are hundreds of characters long) into this: 79 characters, newline, space, next 79 characters, newline, space, next 79 characters, newline, space, etc.

using this simple sed command:

Code:

sed 's/./\
 /80' myfile > newfile

works for the first 79 characters of line x, breaks it properly, but then moves on to the next line in the ldif, leaving line x broken into: 79 characters, newline, space, remaining chunk of line x which is hundreds of characters, next line in ldif. Only partial success!

So heres the question. Is there a way to use sed to run this command every 79th character until the end of the line? If not, alternately, should I use a loop in the script using some sort of conditional statement like, if there are lines longer than 79 characters, rerun the sed command. (so that it will go and now break the remaining hundreds of characters that were not broken in the original sed run. and continue looping till all lines are broken into (79 character, newline, space) chunks? How could I set up that condition? I dont know how to search for lines longer than x characters.

Thanks a lot for any help on this!