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pr – Format Text For Printing

The pr program is used to paginate text. When printing text, it is often desirable to sepa- rate the pages of output with several lines of whitespace, to provide a top and bottom margin for each page. Further, this whitespace can be used to insert a header and footer on each page.

We’ll demonstrate pr by formatting our distros.txt file into a series of very short pages (only the first two pages are shown):

[me@linuxbox ~]$ pr -l 15 -w 65 distros.txt

2016-12-11 18:27 distros.txt Page 1

2016-12-11 18:27 distros.txt Page 2

In this example, we employ the -l option (for page length) and the -w option (page width) to define a “page” that is 65 columns wide and 15 lines long. pr paginates the contents of the distros.txt file, separates each page with several lines of whitespace and creates a default header containing the file modification time, filename, and page number. The pr program provides many options to control page layout. We’ll take a look at more of them in the next chapter.

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