SHELL

bash strip preceeding white space

# Basic syntax:
sed 's/^ *//g'

# Example usage:
echo '                    text' # Printing without sed command
-->                     text
echo '                    text' | sed 's/^ *//g' # Pipe to sed command
--> text

# Note, use the following to remove all whitespace from the end of every line
sed 's/ *$//g'

remove white space from stering in bash

$ var='abc def'
$ echo "$var"
abc def
# Note: flussence's original expression was "${var/ /}", which only replaced the *first* space char., wherever it appeared.
$ echo -n "${var//[[:space:]]/}"
abcdef