Anchor(faq67)

How can I trim leading/trailing white space from one of my variables?

There are a few ways to do this -- none of them elegant.

First, the most portable way would be to use sed: 

   # POSIX
   x=$(echo "$x" | sed -e 's/^[[:space:]]*//' -e 's/[[:space:]]*$//')

One can also achieve the same goal using Bash builtins: 

   # Bash
   # Remove leading whitespace:
   read -r x <<< "$x"

There's also a solution using [:glob:extglob]: 

   # Bash
   shopt -s extglob
   x=${x##+([[:space:]])} x=${x%%+([[:space:]])}
   shopt -u extglob

This also works in KornShell, without needing the explicit extglob setting: 

   # ksh
   x=${x##+([[:space:]])} x=${x%%+([[:space:]])}

There are many, many other ways to do this. These are not necessarily the best, but they're known to work.