Command to trim spaces

[new2unix]

Hi,

For the following command line output (without quotation mark) :

"to be sent: 50982"

I piped the output to "| grep "to be sent:" | cut -d : -f 2" to extract the number portion. How do I get rid of the spaces before the number "50982" before I assign it to a variable? Or is there another command that I can pipe to after the "cut" command to remove the spaces?

Thanks

Mike

 

[grega]

You could use the tr command.

... | grep "to be sent:" | tr -s " " | cut -d" " -f2

Regards,

Greg.

 

[raider2001]

You can also do this with awk. Assumming the number is in field 4.

... | grep "to be sent:" | awk '{print $4}'

If the number is always the last field, you could use the folowing:

... | grep "to be sent:" | awk '{print $NF}'

 

[toolkit]

Plus the advantage of awk would be you could calculate a total as well. If the data is originally stored in file, then you could use:

awk '
    /to be sent/ { total += $NF; count++; print $NF }
    END {
        print "Total:", total
        print "Average:", (total/count)
    }
' file

Cheers, NEIL