Shell Programming and Scripting

I am trying to get sed, tr or awk to search a file that contains records with fields delimited by the vertical bar | and replace the occurrences in the records where the vertical bar is preceded by a space " |" with a vertical bar.

Sample data record
zelli |||59 Stonewall Dr ||W Barnstable |MA ||00000|||man

I need it to look like
zelli|||59 Stonewall Dr||W Barnstable|MA||00000|||man

Thanks for you help in advance.

You can get sed to remove the space prior to the vertical bar and create a new file. You can then validate the output file and then mv back to the original file name

Code:

sed -e 's/\s|/|/g' inputFile > outputFile

Excellent! Thank you!