Shell Removing Tabs/Spaces

Question

I\'ve used a grep command with sed and cut filters that basically turns my output to something similar to this

    this line 1


    this line 2


    another li         


        

Answer 1

This can be done with the tr command as well. Like so

| tr -s [:space:]

or alternatively

| tr -s \\n

if you want to remove the line breaks only, without the space chars in the beginning of each line.