Shell Programming and Scripting

I have a file in which I clean out a bunch of nonsense text as well as path information.

What I end up with is something like the following:
johnson.........................................................933

Where the periods represent the whitespace

The file comes out originally with the columns of name and hits left and right justified respectively. Since the names are of a variable length and the number on the right is also variable length, how would I go about removing the whitespace in the middle? I am newbie to sed, but rapidly falling in love with it.

Thanks in advance

One way with awk:

Code:

 awk '{print $1,$2}' oldfile > newfile

This assumes just two values, it won't work with:
blah blah blah 933

If that is the case then:

Code:

awk '{printf("%s", $1)
         for (i=2; i<NF; i++) {printf(" %s", $i)}
         printf("\n"); ' oldfile > newfile

Am not sure about ur Requiement!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hope this wil do ur task?

sed 's/ *//g' filename


Regards,
Anand