Re: How to do a massive unfill paragraph operation over several hundred files?

[ken <gebser@mousecar.com>]

On 09/28/2018 04:16 AM, Gerald Wildgruber wrote:
> Hi
>
> emacs (latest git checkout, on linux) and org-mode are my main environment for doing (natural language) text related work.
>
> Recently I changed the way text is processed and stored:
>
> I no longer use hard coded line breaks introduced automatically at fill-column with auto-fill-mode enabled;
>
> instead I now use visual-line-mode together with visual-fill-column mode to break lines only VISUALLY at fill-column: there are no real hard-coded line breaks in the file, each paragraph is just one long line.
>
> I would like to harmonize all my existing Org mode and LaTeX text files in this way, i.e.: "unfill" every paragraph within them, -- while ideally preserving Org mode constructs like lists, BEGIN/END blocks etc.
>
> MY QUESTION: What would be a good way to AUTOMATE such an unfill operation, removing all line breaks from all paragraphs over a large number of files?
>
>
> Thanks
>
> Gerald.

Gerald,

It's been decades since I messed with it, but as I vaguely recall
there's a batch mode for emacs.  Basically, you call emacs from the
command line with the "--batch" and other options ("--script
[file_containing_elisp]").