How to remove trailing whitespaces with sed?

by

You can use the in place option -i of sed for Linux and Unix:

sed -i 's/[ \t]*$//' "$1"

Be aware the expression will delete trailing t‘s on OSX (you can use gsed to avoid this problem). It may delete them on BSD too.

If you don’t have gsed, here is the correct (but hard-to-read) sed syntax on OSX:

sed -i '' -E 's/[ '$'\t'']+$//' "$1"

Three single-quoted strings ultimately become concatenated into a single argument/expression. There is no concatenation operator in bash, you just place strings one after the other with no space in between.

The $'\t' resolves as a literal tab-character in bash (using ANSI-C quoting), so the tab is correctly concatenated into the expression.

More Related Contents:

  1. Is it possible to replace a newline AND another character with a single tab using sed?
  2. How can I replace each newline (\n) with a space using sed?
  3. Using different delimiters in sed commands and range addresses
  4. How to insert strings containing slashes with sed? [duplicate]
  5. sed fails with “unknown option to `s'” error [closed]
  6. Combining two sed commands
  7. How to escape single quote in sed?
  8. Shell variables in sed script
  9. Using different delimiters in sed commands and range addresses
  10. Remove non-ASCII characters from CSV
  11. Remove multi-line comments
  12. Insert a line at specific line number with sed or awk
  13. How to replace the nth occurrence of a string using sed
  14. Change multiple files
  15. Remove line if field is duplicate
  16. delete a column with awk or sed
  17. Add text at the end of each line
  18. remove ^M characters from file using sed
  19. How to use awk to print lines where a field matches a specific string?
  20. What is the difference between sed and awk? [closed]
  21. Remove all lines before a match with sed
  22. sed: Replace part of a line
  23. Print lines in file from the match line until end of file
  24. sed gives me “: unexpected EOF (pending }’s) error and I have no idea why
  25. Have sed ignore non-matching lines
  26. sed delete lines not containing specific string
  27. sed + remove “#” and empty lines with one sed command
  28. Trim trailing spaces with PostgreSQL
  29. Replace a word with multiple lines using sed?
  30. Extract version number from a string

Leave a Comment