sed Additional Options 'l' Line-Wrapping

Example

The length of line-wrapping when using the l command is implementation defined.

From the standard:

Long lines shall be folded, with the point of folding indicated by writing a followed by a ; the length at which folding occurs is unspecified, but should be appropriate for the output device.

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GNU sed provides the -l option to specify the length at which to split long lines when printing with the l command, defaulting to seventy characters.

$ yes | head -c100 | tr '\n' ' ' | sed -n l | head -n1 | wc -c
      71
$ yes | head -c100 | tr '\n' ' ' | sed -nl50 l | head -n1 | wc -c
      51

---

BSD sed splits long lines at the number provided by the environment variable COLUMNS, if COLUMNS is not provided then it splits at the terminal width, and if COULMNS is not provided and the output is not a terminal then it defaults to sixty characters.

$ yes | head -c100 | tr '\n' ' ' | sed -n l | head -n1 | wc -c
      61
$ yes | head -c100 | tr '\n' ' ' | COLUMNS=50 sed -n l | head -n1 | wc -c
      51
$ yes | head -c100 | tr '\n' ' ' | sed -n l | head -n1
y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y\
 y y y y y y y y y y $