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The omission of Perl from this post was pretty striking - not even mentioned in the final thoughts (instead thought to do the whole thing in awk??).

Perl has fallen from grace as a general programming language and even as a systems administration language, but it's still absolutely the best and most ubiquitous tool for text manipulation.

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Can you write a Perl program to replace the content of anything found inside double-quotes with the result of piping it to the command `fmt`?

Easily, though you don't need to drag external programs like fmt into it - perl comes with a standard module for word wrapping.

Text::Balanced (for extracting the quoted text) and Text::Wrap would be the core of such a program.

https://perldoc.perl.org/Text::Balanced

https://perldoc.perl.org/Text::Wrap

Could you write it for me as a one-liner? I’d like to learn more Perl and this would help.

Oh, I wouldn't try to squeeze it down into a one liner. Maybe for a simple definition of the quoted text that doesn't need to account for edge cases like escaped quotes inside...

Just a normal program then? No edge cases needed

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