How to remove all white spaces from a given text file

linux bash sed
Lunar Mushrooms picture Lunar Mushrooms · Mar 31, 2012 · Viewed 281.6k times · Source

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.

Answer

Paulo Scardine picture Paulo Scardine · Mar 31, 2012 
$ 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:]"

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