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       Playing with text, (circumlunar), 07/11/2018
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1. In the beginning, there   | 7. Several tools presented
was a curious fellow named   | themselves as worthwhile
Tfurrows.                    | options, and most of these
                             | he did try to use, but only
2. He wondered how hard it   | a few of them ened up being
would be to create a gopher  | what Tfurrows wanted.
post that was formatted      |
like many common english     | 8. Finally, he settled on
Bibles, with the text        | fold, head, tail, and pr,
broken up into two columns.  | in that order.
                             |
3. There was no good reason  | 9. Fold was used to take
for his curiosity- as is     | his text file- which was
generally the case with      | simply long lines of text
curiosity- but he wanted to  | with numbers at the
see how it would be done     | beginning of each one- and
nonetheless.                 | break them down to the size
                             | he wanted (28 characters,
4. Ideally, he would use a   | so that two columns would
few common command-line      | be about 60 characters.)
tools, indigenous to any     |
good *nix system.            | 10. Head and tail served
                             | their simple purpose well,
5. Surely the task could be  | breaking the input file
accomplished cleanly using   | into two parts without
a programming language, but  | breaking any words.
Tfurrows wasn't in the mood  |
to program, he was in the    | 11. And finally, pr was
mood to cobble together a    | perfectly suited to merging
hasty and useless script.    | the two new text files into
                             | a single, 2-column ouput
6. So, away he went on his   | with a nicer divider in the
adventure, starting with a   | middle.
text file to test with and   |
a bash script that would     | 12. Tfurrows saw that the
take a filename as an input  | output was what he wanted,
argument.                    | and he ended his foolish
                             | quest for the evening.


And of course,  here's the script.  It's nothing special, I
was just bored and had some time to waste. I don't see this
as useful,  but nonetheless, I'd love to see cooler ways to
do the same thing:

//// START SCRIPT ////

#!/bin/bash
if [ $# -eq 0 ]
  then
    echo "Please provide a filename."
    exit 1
fi

temp_file=$(mktemp)
temp_file2=$(mktemp)

fold -s -w 28 $1 > $temp_file

linecount=`wc -l < $temp_file`
firsthalf=$(($linecount/2))
secondhalf=$(($linecount-$firsthalf))

head -n $firsthalf $temp_file > OUTa
tail -n $secondhalf $temp_file > OUTb
pr -S" | " -w 60 -t -m OUTa OUTb > $temp_file2
cat $temp_file2

rm $temp_file
rm $temp_file2
rm OUTa
rm OUTb

//// END SCRIPT ////

As far as the input  text file,  it was just lines  of text
starting with numbers, one "verse" per line, with  a  blank
line between. I'm pleased with the output.