sed - remove white space from the end of line in linux

Question

(This question already has answers here): question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20521857/remove-white-space-from-the-end-of-line-in-linux

Answer 1

Use either a simple blank * or [:blank:]* to remove all possible spaces at the end of the line:

sed 's/ *$//' file

Using the [:blank:] class you are removing spaces and tabs:

sed 's/[[:blank:]]*$//' file

Note this is POSIX, hence compatible in both GNU sed and BSD.

For just GNU sed you can use the GNU extension s* to match spaces and tabs, as described in BaBL86's answer. See POSIX specifications on Basic Regular Expressions.

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Let's test it with a simple file consisting on just lines, two with just spaces and the last one also with tabs:

$ cat -vet file
hello   $
bye   $
ha^I  $     # there is a tab here

Remove just spaces:

$ sed 's/ *$//' file | cat -vet -
hello$
bye$
ha^I$       # tab is still here!

Remove spaces and tabs:

$ sed 's/[[:blank:]]*$//' file | cat -vet -
hello$
bye$
ha$         # tab was removed!