How to remove all white spaces from a given text file

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 wa

Answer 1

Try this:

tr -d " \t" <filename

See the manpage for tr(1) for more details.

Answer 2

This is probably the simplest way of doing it:

sed -r 's/\s+//g' filename > output
mv ouput filename

Answer 3

hmm...seems like something on the order of sed -e "s/[ \t\n\r\v]//g" < hello.txt should be in the right ballpark (seems to work under cygwin in any case).

Answer 4

$ 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:]"

Answer 5

Much simpler to my opinion:

sed -r 's/\s+//g' filename