Using awk or sed, I'd like to remove leading spaces after a comma and before a right justified number in field 6. Sounds simple but I can't find a solution. Each field's formatting must stay intact.

Input:

40,123456-02,160,05/24/2012,02/13/1977, 10699.15,0

40,123456-02,160,05/24/2012,02/13/1977,10699.15,0

Your example only showed this occurring once; not sure if it occurs outside of that 6th column. But...

echo 40,123456-02,160,05/24/2012,02/13/1977, 10699.15,0 | sed 's/, /,/'
40,123456-02,160,05/24/2012,02/13/1977,10699.15,0

My apologies. My original post was not very clear. I don't have any code yet for awk or sed, just a file with multiple lines of data that look like the example below (this is better than my original example):

 1,  3456-78, 42,05/02/2012,05/12/1984,  1230.00, 4

1,3456-78,42,05/02/2012,05/12/1984,1230.00,4

Hi Scottie1954,

Try the following, there are two spaces before the star;

cat "filename" | sed 's/,  */,/g' > "newfilename"

That got me going the right direction, so thank you.

It took me two steps to get what I wanted:

sed 's/,  */,/g' FILE1 >junk1     # remove leading spaces before commas

sed 's/^ *//' junk1 >junk2        # remove leading space(s) from beginning of line

Hi Scottie1954,

Sorry I didn't look at the post properly, it would have worked with;

cat "filename" | sed 's/  */,/g' > "newfilename"