Date: Fri, 12 May 2006 09:50:46 -0500 From: Martin McCormick <martin@dc.cis.okstate.edu> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Trimming Whitespace From Beginning and end of Text Lines Message-ID: <200605121450.k4CEokhn022089@dc.cis.okstate.edu>
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This looks like something sed should be able to do, but I
haven't had any luck at all. I wanted to remove any whitespace
that has accidentally gotten added to the beginning or end of
some lines of text. I made a test file that looks like:
left justified.
lots of spaces.
and the best I have done so far is to get rid of about 3 spaces.
Attempt 1.
#! /usr/bin/sed -f
s/ \+//g
s/^ //g
s/ $//g
This looks like it should do the job, but the leading and
trailing spaces are still mostly there.
I wrote another script. Attempt 2.
#! /bin/sh
sed 's/^[[:space:]]//g' \
|sed 's/[[:space:]]$//g'
If I cat the test file through this script, it also
removes one or two spaces, but not all the leading and trailing
whitespace I put there. I can write a program in C to do this,
but is there a sed script or other native application in FreeBSD that
can do this?
Thank you.
Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Network Operations Group
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