Shell Programming and Scripting

Platform: Oracle Linux 6.5
I have a file with hundreds of values enclosed in single quotes like below. I want the trailing empty spaces before the ending quote to be removed. Expected output shown below. Can this be done using good old vi editor ? Or should I use sed or awk for this ?

Code:

$ cat someStings.txt
'ABC  '
'CDE  '
'FGHIJKL  '
'MN  '

Expected output:

Code:

'ABC'
'CDE'
'FGHIJKL'
'MN'

Note : unix.com's editor is not working well with my Firefox or Chrome browser. Because of this , I see a preceeding space before 'ABC' in the 'Exprected output' . Please ignore this.

For your special case given above, try

Code:

awk '{sub (/ *\047$/, "\047")} 1' file

It doesn't account for leading space/quote combinations nor for those not at line end.

Code:

$ cat test.txt
'ABC  '
'CDE  '
'FGHIJKL  '
'MN  '
'TEST HELLO   '
' HI TEST TXT   '


$ sed "s, *'$,',g" test.txt
'ABC'
'CDE'
'FGHIJKL'
'MN'
'TEST HELLO'
' HI TEST TXT'

Hello kraljic,

Following may also help you in same too.

Code:

perl -p -e "s/ *'/'/g"   Input_file

Output will be as follows.

Code:

'ABC'
'CDE'
'FGHIJKL'
'MN'

Thanks,
R. Singh

Hi kraljic,
As to your question of whether or not this can be done "using good old vi editor", the answer is yes. The command:

Code:

:g/  *'$/s//'/

will do it. And, of course, this also means that if you're using the good old ed or ex editors, you can also accomplish the same thing with the command:

Code:

g/  *'$/s//'/