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How to Trim String in bash?

Posted on April 16, 2020

Hi all,

Is there an easy way to trim a string in bash?

For example if I wanted to trim a string with JS, I could simply do string.trim();.

However as far as I can see there is no such command in bash:

  1. trim

The output that I get is:

  1. trim: command not found

Any suggestions would be appreciated!



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Hello,

There are multiple ways to do this depending on what exactly you would like to achieve.

One of the most straight forward ways to trim a string in bash is to use the xargs command. Here’s a quick example:

echo "   some text here  " | xargs

You would get the following output:

some text here

Note that the spaces between the words are still there, only the initial and trailing spaces are removed.

Hope that this helps! Regards, Bobby

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