bashsed

How to remove all white spaces from a given text file?

I want to remove all the white spaces from a given text file. Is there any shell command available for this? Use sed perhaps?

I tried this : cat hello.txt | sed 's/ //g'

But it removes only spaces, not tabs.

Solution 
  • $ 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:]"