Menu
My shell has a call to 'fortune' in my .login file, to provide me with a little message of the day. However, some of the fortunes begin with one leading whitespace line, some begin with two, and some don't have any leading whitespace lines at all. This bugs me.
I sat down to wrapper fortune with my own shell script, which would remove all the leading whitespace from the input, without destroying any formatting of the actual fortune, which may intentionally have lines of whitespace.
It doesn't appear to be an easy one-liner two-minute fix, and as I read(reed) through the man pages for sed and grep, I figured I'd ask our wonderful patrons here.
679
Use sed 's/^ *//g', to remove the leading white spaces.
s/[[:space:]]//g; – as before, the s command removes all whitespace from the text in the current pattern space.
Answer. lstrip() removes leading white-spaces, rstrip() removes trailing white-spaces and strip() removes leading and trailing white-spaces from a given string.
Using the same source as Dav:
# delete all leading blank lines at top of file
sed '/./,$!d'
Source: http://www.linuxhowtos.org/System/sedoneliner.htm?ref=news.rdf
Additionally, here's why this works:
The comma separates a "range" of operation. sed can accept regular expressions for range definitions, so /./ matches the first line with "anything" (.) on it and $ specifies the end of the file. Therefore,
/./,$ matches "the first not-blank line to the end of the file".! then inverts that selection, making it effectively "the blank lines at the top of the file".d deletes those lines.
139
# delete all leading blank lines at top of file
sed '/./,$!d'
Source: http://www.linuxhowtos.org/System/sedoneliner.htm?ref=news.rdf
Just pipe the output of fortune into it:
fortune | sed '/./,$!d'
How about:
sed "s/^ *//" < fortunefile
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With
