Shell Programming and Scripting

Indeed for trailing whitespace we would have to do something like this:

Code:

while IFS= read -r line
do     
  mv "${line%%[[:space:]]*}" "${line#*[[:space:]]}"
done < file_desc

(But I think it is best to leave that out to protect an unsuspecting admin from mystery whitespace.. It is far more likely anyway, that a hand-edited input file contains unintended tabs or spaces at the end of the line. )

---------- Post updated at 23:08 ---------- Previous update was at 22:58 ----------

BTW. the cut statement would compress spaces and leave out trailing space since -f2- combines the remaining fields with one space in between. This behaviour is probably not as intended, so I think your solution really is best suited for this application.

Many thanks all.
Problem solved.