Question

File1:

  hello  
  world  

How would one delete the leading/trailing blank spaces within this file using sed – using one command (no intermediate files)?

I’ve currently got:

sed -e 's/^[ \t]*//' a > b

For leading spaces.

sed 's/ *$//' b > c

And this for trailing spaces.

Answer 1

You almost got it:

sed -e 's/^[ \t]*//;s/[ \t]*$//' a > c

Moreover on some flavours of sed, there is also an option for editing inline:

sed -i -e 's/^[ \t]*//;s/[ \t]*$//' a