Question

I want to remove all the white spaces from a given text file.

Is there any shell command available for this ?

Or, how to use sed for this purpose?

I want something like below:

$ cat hello.txt | sed ….

I tried this : cat hello.txt | sed 's/ //g' .

But it removes only spaces, not tabs.

Thanks.

Answer 1

$ man tr
NAME
    tr - translate or delete characters

SYNOPSIS
    tr [OPTION]... SET1 [SET2]

DESCRIPTION
   Translate, squeeze, and/or delete characters from standard 
   input, writing to standard output.

In order to wipe all whitespace including newlines you can try:

cat file.txt | tr -d " \t\n\r" 

You can also use the character classes defined by tr (credits to htompkins comment):

cat file.txt | tr -d "[:space:]"

For example, in order to wipe just horizontal white space:

cat file.txt | tr -d "[:blank:]"