Removing leading spaces in a text file

Question

I have a bunch of texts files although they all have spaces at the beginning of lines

e.g.

 testing 123
 download
 upload

would be

testing 123
download
upload

Preferably using a utility such as grep etc.

The answer is going to be different for linux and windows. Can you remove the tag for one of them (unless you happened to need the answer for both OS's) — matzahboy, Jun 03 '11 at 13:20
Do you want to do this in place (ie. overwriting the original files) or into new files (so you keep the originals)? — Richard, Jun 03 '11 at 13:21
@matzahboy that depends what you use, my perl solution is cross platform. — Raoul, Jun 03 '11 at 13:21
@Raoul good point. I was thinking shell script which isn't cross platform — matzahboy, Jun 03 '11 at 22:08

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 03 '11 at 13:24

1

sed -i -e's/^\s*//' yourfilenamehere

answered Jun 03 '11 at 13:24

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 03 '11 at 13:25

1

You can use sed

sed 's/^ *//' file

This should work with Linux and your GNUWin Toolkit.

echo "     Line starting with spaces" | sed 's/^[ \t]*//'

answered Jun 03 '11 at 13:25

keyboardP

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 03 '11 at 13:20

0

perl -pi -e 's/^\s+//' yourfilenamehere

answered Jun 03 '11 at 13:20

Raoul

Sorry, perl is arkward for me, as I would need to install it on a few hundred pc's – Jay Jun 03 '11 at 13:21
@Jay your post is tagged linux, >99% ship with Perl installed. – Raoul Jun 03 '11 at 13:22

3 Answers3