Removing blank spaces and tabs from line without messing with line endings

command linefiles

I am trying to remove all spaces on a file without messing with line endings. This is to be run from inside a bash script.

I have tried all the solutions here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9953448/how-to-remove-all-white-spaces-from-a-given-text-file

They work from the command line but when I try them from the bash script the final file is a mess, completely destroyed.

File is using UNIX file endings.

Any clues?

Best Answer

You should be able to use tr, but not as specified on the page your link points to as that includes the removal of newline and carriage return. What you should do is:

tr -d " \t" < infile.txt > outfile.txt

Related Solutions

Bash – file, arrays and output

With

(( count + 3 ))

you just adding 3 to $count and discarding the result. Try with

(( count = count + 3 ))

Shell Command Line Text Processing Files – How to Remove Blank Lines from a File (Including Tabs and Spaces)?

Just grep for non-blanks:

grep '[^[:blank:]]' < file.in > file.out

[:blank:], inside character ranges ([...]), is called a POSIX character class. There are a few like [:alpha:], [:digit:]... [:blank:] matches horizontal white space (in the POSIX locale, that's space and tab, but in other locales there could be more, like all the Unicode horizontal spacing characters in UTF8 locales) while [[:space:]] matches horizontal and vertical white space characters (same as [:blank:] plus things like vertical tab, form feed...).

grep '[:blank:]'

Would return the lines that contain any of the characters, :, b, l, a, n or k. Character classes are only recognised within [...], and ^ within [...] negates the set. So [^[:blank:]] means any character but the blank ones.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Bash – file, arrays and output

Shell Command Line Text Processing Files – How to Remove Blank Lines from a File (Including Tabs and Spaces)?

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