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[Solved] Help with using tr - Removing white spaces

 
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# 1  
Old 10-01-2011
[Solved] Help with using tr - Removing white spaces
Hi,

I have a file that contains whitespaces with spaces and spaces and tabs on each line and am wanting to remove the whitespaces. My version of sed is one that does not recognize \t etc.

The sed and awk one-liners below that I found via Google both does not work.
Quote:
sed:
sed 's/^[ \t]*//;s/[ \t]*$//'

awk:
awk '{gsub(/^[ \t]+|[ \t]+$/,"");print}'

So my next best option is to use tr, am using tr -d '[:space:]' < in > out and while that one works, I am unfortunately losing the line endings.

When I run the tr command

The input below:

Code:
 
server01  :/mnt/arch  :20  :15 :40 :85 :N :
server02  :/mnt/arch2 :32  :15 :40 :85 :N :

Becomes:

Code:
server01:/mnt/volarch:20:15:40:85:N:server02:/mnt/arch2:32:15:40:85:N:

Preferably, I want it to be as below:

Code:
 
server01:/mnt/volarch:20:15:40:85:N:
server02:/mnt/arch2:32:15:40:85:N:

At the moment since I don't know how to get around this, am using a while read loop that reads each line and running tr -d '[:space:]' on each line. I believe this is a bit of an overkill.

Can anyone advise whether I should be able to get the desired result using tr instead of the while loop?

Thanks in advance.
Last edited by vbe; 10-28-2011 at 05:18 AM..
# 2  
Old 10-01-2011
Quote:
Originally Posted by newbie_01
tr -d '[:space:]'
Try using
Code:
tr -d '[blank]'

instead.
This User Gave Thanks to AlphaLexman For This Post:
newbie_01
# 3  
Old 10-01-2011
Quote:
Originally Posted by AlphaLexman
Try using
Code:
tr -d '[blank]'

instead.
That should be [:blank:], otherwise it will simply delete all instances of [, b, l, a, n, k, and ] in the file.

Regards,
Alister
This User Gave Thanks to alister For This Post:
newbie_01
# 4  
Old 10-27-2011
Quote:
Originally Posted by alister
That should be [:blank:], otherwise it will simply delete all instances of [, b, l, a, n, k, and ] in the file.

Regards,
Alister
Your correction's timely ...

Thanks a lot, tried on both Solaris and Linux all good so far
 
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