how to get rid of trailing white spaces using awk

[Pando]

how can i remove of the traing white spaces using awk.

I have used the command below to get the value but i also get the white spaces with it.

mode=$(awk -F "," '/Test Mode/ {print $2}' $MFILE)

Maximum points for al correct replies.

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

does it /have/ to be awk?

# perl -ple's/\s+$//' file

And to strip trailing whitespace in-place (the file itself will actually be changed):

# perl -pli -e's/\s+$//' file

Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn

[Gordon Morrison_1]

Why be AWKward? ksh can do it.
If it is a single "word" with training spaces, declare the variable that will hold it with:
typeset -L varname
or
shortline=${line%%[ ]*}
(Put a tab and a space inside the []'s

If it's a line with more than one word on it, pass the line variable to a function, then extract each word with $1 $2 $3 etc. within that function (Don't pass the variable inside quotes, or it will take the whole thing to be $1)

[Peter Godron]

Fernando,
with sed:
to delete whitespaces from end of line
sed 's/[ \t]*$//'
to delete whitespaces from start and end of line
sed 's/^[ \t]*//;s/[ \t]*$//'

\t represents the tab key!

Regards

[Leif Halvarsson_2]

Hi,
use the gsub function in awk.

gsub(" ","",$MFILE); print $MFILE

[Noel Miranda]

You can also pipe the output to awk again, this time printing the first field, with separator being the default, i.e white space.

[Hein van den Heuvel]

untested:

mode=$(awk -F "," '/Test Mode/ { sub(/ *$/,"",$2); print $2}' $MFILE)


The ere specifies any number of spaces at the end of $2 to be replaced with nothing.

Hein.

[Amit Agarwal_1]

you can try combination of match and substr.

mode=$(awk -F "," '/Test Mode/ {print substr($2, 1, match($2, "[ \t]*$")-1)}' $MFILE)


-Amit

[Ionut Grigorescu_2]

Fernando, you should give some points to Noel, so why not pipe it to awk again, like:
awk -F "," '/Test Mode/{print $2}' $MFILE|awk -F " " '{print $1}'
..but still I would use perl...

[Amit Agarwal_1]

Fernando is using "," as FS, so I tend to believe that each field can be in form of multiple words. *IF* it is so, then Noel's solution won't work.