Trimming Whitespace From Beginning and end of Text Lines

[Martin McCormick]

	This looks like something sed should be able to do, but I
haven't had any luck at all.  I wanted to remove any whitespace
that has accidentally gotten added to the beginning or end of
some lines of text.  I made a test file that looks like:

left justified.
	                                       lots of spaces.
      
and the best I have done so far is to get rid of about 3 spaces.

Attempt 1.

#! /usr/bin/sed -f
s/ \+//g
s/^ //g
s/ $//g

	This looks like it should do the job, but the leading and
trailing spaces are still mostly there.

	I wrote another script.  Attempt 2.

#! /bin/sh

sed 's/^[[:space:]]//g' \
|sed 's/[[:space:]]$//g' 

	If I cat the test file through this script, it also
removes one or two spaces, but not all the leading and trailing
whitespace I put there.  I can write a program in C to do this,
but is there a sed script or other native application in FreeBSD that
can do this?

	Thank you.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Network Operations Group