Deleting spaces at the end of line in a file

[Sammy_2]

How do you delete blank spaces from the end of each line in a file ? (using either a awk, sed, or just vi editor)

[Sanjay_6 · Accepted solution]

Hi Sam,

Try this link,

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0xed737d4cf554d611abdb0090277a778c,00.html

Hope this helps.

Regds

[S.K. Chan]

This will delete trailing spaces and tabs from end of each line.

# cat file | sed 's/[ \t]*$//' > newfile

[A. Clay Stephenson]

This would be one method:

cat myfile | perl -e 'while () { $_ =~ s/\s+/$//; print "$_\n"; }' > newfile

[John Payne_2]

If you want to do it manually, vi the file. Go to the line you want and to the end of the line where the spaces are, then hit the 'x' key until all the spaces are gone. Then go to the next line you want to edit and continue.

To get out of vi, ':wq!'. If you want to get out without saving, ':q!'.

Hope it helps

John

[Sachin Patel]

Hi Sam you can use sed

# delete trailing whitespace (spaces, tabs) from end of each line
sed 's/[ \t]*$//' # see note on '\t' at end of file

# delete BOTH leading and trailing whitespace from each line
sed 's/^[ \t]*//;s/[ \t]*$//'

Sachin

[Sammy_2]

Thanks sanjay for the link.
Clay, glad you showed me a way in perl. Am learning perl and will try it.
Chan and Sachin, do appreciate it .
And John, thanks for the help but I am trying to do it globally.

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

Not for the points!

A.Clay, learn the command line switches:

cat myfile | perl -e 'while () { $_ =~ s/\s+/$//; print "$_\n"; }' > newfile

is equal to

perl -ple 's/\s+$//' newfile

easier to read, ain't it?

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

N/A

Hit submit toooo early

cat myfile | perl -e 'while () { $_ =~ s/\s+/$//; print "$_\n"; }' > newfile

s/\s+/$// is illegal syntax, you mean s/\s+$//

in substitutions without extra flags, the $ in perl will match *before* the newline, so above (and my previous post) will add newlines

perl -pe 's/\s+$//' outfile

should do. I now dropped the -l flag, which adds a newline to every print statement

[Graham Cameron_1]

This would seem to do it, with less hoeroglyphics than most so far...

cat myfile|sed "s/[[:space:]]*$//" > newfile

It also handles all whitespace characters.
BTW - is this an Oracle spool file? If so you can suppress the spaces using
"SET TRIMSPOOL ON".

Graham