Question

I have a pipe delimited file as below

1  |Mike    |   2000|     2|
2  |Peter   |   4000|     2|

…..
…
…. and so on.

I want to remove the leading and trailing spaces between fields. It should look like as below

1|Mike|2000|2|
2|Peter|4000|2|

Is there any way in shell script to achieve this output?

Thanks,
Chandraa

Answer 1

You can try

cat datafile | tr -d ' \t'

cat datafile | tr -d '[:space:]' # will remove all spaces including the new line at the end of each line