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To: "'Giorgos Keramidas'" <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr>
Date: Fri, 12 May 2006 17:56:16 +0200
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Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: RE: Trimming Whitespace From Beginning and end of Text Lines
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> > 	sed -i -e 's/^[[:space:]]*' -e 's/[[:space:]]*$//' file ...

why not use just (you can change the "-" separator to "/" as above):
sed -e 's-^ *--g' -e 's- *$--g'

usage examples:
-> cat file| sed ... >file1
-> echo $variable| sed ... |grep xy
-> if [ "`echo $xy|sed ...`" = "blabla bla" ]; then ...

cu...