UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Greetings.
If I have a file with the following format:

joe__________blow
1313 mockingbird pl.
Los Angeles________, CA. 90210


bill__________clinton
1234 doghouse
New York__________, NY. 12345


(note: I underlined what are spaces in the list due to the fact the billboard spaces them to 1 space)

How would I go about trimming the spaces between the words
down to 1 space?

I thought about sed, but the field delimiter is not fixed (a last name could have multiple parts for instances, and the space between first/last city/state is not a tab).

I am essentially looking for an ltrim/rtrim command for shell.

Thanks in advance.
gee-dub

Try this:

Code:

echo "This is    a   weird            line,   yo" | sed 's/   */ /g'

In the sed statement, it's :
slash,space,space,space,star,slash,space,slash
(as if that makes more sense

It didn't seem to like "sed 's/ +/ /g'"
(space,space,plus)...
Anyone know why?

that worked great. thanks alot 'livin free'.
gee-dub

There are two kinds of regular expressions: basic regular expressions, and extended regular expressions. sed only uses basic regular expressions. The + sign is a feature of extended regular expressions.

Ahh, I see now.
Thank you for the reply!