i've found it's nice for fmt to know about leading formatting such as a "> " for email or a " * " for c comments. this is especially helpful when dealing with email from folks whose mailers don't wrap, or badly formatted comments.
for example, /* * this is a comment block that is way too long. the new option -q quotestr gives fmt the ability to reformat lines like this and keep the beginning-of-line formatting. */ |fmt -q ' * ' /* * this is a comment block that is way too long. the new option -q * quotestr gives fmt the ability to reformat lines like this and * keep the beginning-of-line formatting. */ now that this comment doesn't need the first sentence, fmt -q will fix it up again. http://www.quanstro.net/magic/man2html/1/fmt also, nedmail now has a "" cmd to reformat quoted text with fmt. - erik