I discovered that where 'tr -s' works as expected on grepped input, it appears to completely fail on dig results.

I am not sure if this is because of some sort of non posix compliancy, or what.

Here is what I did:
The command below works as expected, squeezing all repeated spaces to a single space:
ps -ef | grep mc | tr -s \ | cut -d\ -f2,8-9

When i try this on dig, it fails absolutely, as do all possible variances of squeeze in regards to whitespace I could figure out:
dig subkeys.pgp.net | tr -s \
dig subkeys.pgp.net | tr -s \040
dig subkeys.pgp.net | tr -s "040"
dig subkeys.pgp.net | tr -s [:blank:]
dig subkeys.pgp.net | tr -s [:space:]
dig subkeys.pgp.net | tr -s '[:space:]'
(none of the above squeeze any type of whitespace that I could tell)

I ended up doing this,. which has the desired effect:
dig subkeys.pgp.net | tr -t [:space:] \ | cut -d \ -f5

Can anyone explain why squeeze doesn't seem to work on dig results?

Thanks for any help. I appreciate the education.

Bruce D. Meyer