Hi I'm a programming newbie and today i was reading "the UNIX programming environment" (Kernigan and pike)and they
set a problem which has got me stumpted.The problem is related to an awk script that folds lines of more than 80 characters.The problem is that you have to modify the awk script(Which i will display below)so that it will fold your lines at blanks or tabs rather than splitting a word in the fold process.So here's the program:

sed 's/<tab>/ /g' $* |
awk '
BEGIN {
N = 80
for(i = 1; i <= N; i++)
blanks = blanks " "
}
{ if((n = length($0)) <= N)
print
else {
for(i = 1; n > N; n -= N) {
printf "%s\\\n", substr($0,i,N)
i += N;
}
printf "%s%s\n", substr(blanks,1,N-n), substr($0,i)
}
} '
So please could someone kindly type out a modified version or give me some suggestions.Thankx in advance.

Sounds like an excellent book for a college course.

What class are you taking?

This isn't related to any course I'm taking it's just something I'm doing
at home.

It is difficult reading this code because you didn't put it inside a CODE block.

The line blank = blank " " doesn't look right.

I thought I had an idea of locating the last space before N and print the line like:
but when you take tabs into consideration, things are complicated. What do you use for a tabstop width? I don't think that length($0) takes tabs into consideration either so it doesn't look like a simple adjustment of the loop.

They pre-expanded the text before processing with awk.

I created a pdf version of the info manual from the texinfo source in the source gawk package. I highly recommend you do the same.

thanks for your replies.How could i locate the last space before N?.