How to remove leading and trailing whitespaces?

Question

I\'m using awk \'{gsub(/^[ \\t]+|[ \\t]+$/,\"\"); print;}\' in.txt > out.txt to remove both leading and trailing whitespaces.

The problem is the output f

Answer 1

Your files probably have Windows line endings. That means that they end with \r\n, so matching a sequence of tabs and spaces at the end of the line won't work -- awk tries to match all the tabs and spaces that come after the \r. Try running the file through tr -d "\r" before sending it to awk.