How i can delete whitespace in each line of file, using bash For instance, file1.txt. Before:
gg g
gg g
t ttt
after:
gg g
gg g
t ttt
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All whitespace or just leading whitespace characters on a line. For instance, should " ggg gg" become "ggg gg" or "ggggg" – Chris Newman Feb 16 '12 at 10:50
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2 khachik Yes, whitespace is deleted, but how i can change my file? – G-71 Feb 16 '12 at 10:53
5 Answers
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sed -i 's/ //g' your_file will do it, modifying the file inplace.
To delete only the whitespaces at the beginning of one single line, use sed -i 's/^ *//' your_file
In the first expression, we replace all spaces with nothing.
In the second one, we replace at the beginning using the ^ keyword
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5Yes, did your question somehow mean something else?? `s/^ *//` deletes leading whitespace if that's what you want ... but perhaps you should also edit your question then. – tripleee Feb 16 '12 at 11:06
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The `/g` is redundant but harmless in that case, the regex already takes care of substituting all leading whitespace in one go. – tripleee Feb 16 '12 at 14:06
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tr(delete all whitespaces):
$ tr -d ' ' <input.txt >output.txt
$ mv output.txt input.txt
sed(delete leading whitespaces)
$ sed -i 's/^ *//' input.txt
kev
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Thank you veru much and if i want to delete only whitespace in the begin of each line of file (excuse me i edit question :( ) – G-71 Feb 16 '12 at 11:13
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use can use perl -i for in place replacement.
perl -p -e 's/^ *//' file
Vijay
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Yes, yes! I was looking for a clean, quick way of stripping all beginning and trailing whitespace from lines in source code files. The above code strips the newline characters, not a desirable trait for my purposes, so `perl -pi -e 's/^[\ \t]+|[\ \t]+$//g' [file]` does exactly what I needed. – Eric L. Jun 13 '13 at 17:21
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To delete the white spaces before start of the line if the pattern matches. Use the following command. For example your foo.in has pattern like this
This is a test
Lolll
blaahhh
This is a testtt
After issuing following command
sed -e '/This/s/ *//' < foo.in > foo.out
The foo.out will be
This is a test
Lolll
blaahhh
This is a testtt
Sopan Kurkute
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"Whitespace" can include both spaces AND tabs. The solutions presented to date will only match and operate successfully on spaces; they will fail if the whitespace takes the form of a tab.
The below has been tested on the OP's specimen data set with both spaces AND tabs, matching successfully & operating on both:
sed 's/^[[:blank:]]*//g' yourFile
After testing, supply the -i switch to sed to make the changes persistent-
F1Linux
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