CentOS-6.2
I am investigating how to split long lines present in a Mailman generated html archives. Mailman places the email bodies within <pre></pre> tags and some users have MUAs that send entire paragraphs as one long line.
I have looked at fmt and fold but these assume a pipeline from stdout to a fixed filename, which presumably is best done at the time of the original file's creation. I am looking for a way to deal with multiple existing files in a batch fashion so that the reformatted file is written back out to the same file name oin the same location.
I cannot seem to hit upon a way to get this to work using find, xargs and fmt (or fold). Nor can I seem to find an example of how this might be done using these utilities.
What I would like to discover is the functional equivalent of this:
find /path/to/archives/*.html -print | xargs -I {} fmt -s {} > {}
This syntax does not work of course because the xargs file name substitution only occurs once in the initial argument list of the following command. But, this example does describe the effect I wish to obtain, to have the original file name receive the reformatted contents.