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

You can also use grep:

... | grep -o '[^$(printf '\t') ].*' 

Here we print lines that have at least one character that isn't white space. By using the "-o" flag, we print only the match, and we force the match to start on a non white space character.

EDIT: Changed command so it can remove the leading white space characters.

Hope this helps =)