sed tip: Remove / Delete All Leading Blank Spaces / Tabs ( whitespace ) From Each Line

The sed (Stream Editor) is very powerful tool. Each line of input is copied into a pattern space. You can run editing commands on each input line to delete or change the input. For example, delete lines containing word DVD, enter:
cat input.txt | sed '/DVD/d'

To Print the lines between each pair of words pen and pencil, inclusive, enter:
$ cat input.txt sed -e '/^PEN/,/^PENCIL/p'

To remove all blank lines, enter:
$ cat /etc/rssh.conf | sed '/^$/d' > /tmp/output.file

sed is very handy tool for editing and deleting unwanted stuff. Following echo statements printed lots of whitespace from left side:
echo "     This is a test"
Output:

         This is a test

To remove all whitespace (including tabs) from left to first word, enter:
echo "     This is a test" | sed -e 's/^[ \t]*//'
Output:

This is a test

Where,

• s/ : Substitute command ~ replacement for pattern (^[ \t]*) on each addressed line
• ^[ \t]* : Search pattern ( ^ - start of the line; [ \t]* match one or more blank spaces including tab)
• // : Replace (delete) all matched pattern

Following sample script reads some data from text file and generate a formatted output. It delete all leading whitespace from front of each line so that text get aligned to left:

#!/bin/bash
FILE=url.dump.txt
DOMAIN=yourdomain.com
exec 3<&0
exec 0<$FILE
while read line
do
	url=$(echo "http://${DOMAIN}${line}")
        title="$(lynx -dump -source ${url} | grep '<title>' | awk -F '<title>' '{ print $2 }' | cut -d'<' -f1|sed 's/^[ \t]*//')"
        echo "<li>${title}</li>"
done
exec 0<&3
 

To delete trailing whitespace from end of each line, enter:
$ cat input.txt | sed 's/[ \t]*$//' > output.txt
Better remove all leading and trailing whitespace from end of each line:
$ cat input.txt | sed 's/^[ \t]*//;s/[ \t]*$//' > output.txt

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