Scipt to add carriage return to text after number of words

[Jamess]

I'm trying to automatically add a carriage return after a certain number of words in a plain text file. I've opened the file in gedit but can't see any options to format it to include the current word wrap as new lines/carriage returns. So I tried writing a bash script to do the job and this is as far as I've got:

#!/bin/bash
MaxWords=10
WordCount=$(head -3 $1 | tail -1 | wc -w)
if [ $WordCount -gt $MaxWords ]; then
	echo "add a carriage return after 10 words"
else 
	echo "don't add a carriage return"
fi

What command could I use to edit the text file? Or is there a better way to do this?

thanks

James

[tpl]

interesting little problem.

strategy: first reformat text as a long list of words
separated by spaces:

tr [:cntrl:] " " <filename | tr -s " " >new.filename

this removes all newlines/formfeeds and compresses
multiple spaces to one

second, insert a newline every ten words:

awk 'BEGIN { FS=" " } {
i=1
while ( i <= NF ) {
j=1
while (j<=10) {
printf ( "%s ", $i )
i++;j++
}
}
next
}
END { print "" }' <new.filename