Trimming Whitespace From Beginning and end of Text Lines

[Chuck Swiger]

Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
> On 2006-05-12 11:27, Chuck Swiger <cswiger at mac.com> wrote:
>   
>> It is, and I wish to acknowledge the above are entirely valid solutions
>> to the problem, but...
>>
>>   python -c 'import sys; print sys.stdin.read().strip()' < file...
>>
>> ...has the advantage of being human readable.  My old 300-baud accoustic
>> modem used to generate output which in hindsight looks astonishingly
>> close to regex character classes.  :-)
>>     
>
> HEH!  I see the joke about Perl being similar to "line noise" is not
> something local to our Greek IRC channels :)

Indeed.  :)  I must confess that it doesn't do in-place replacement of 
the files, though.  I'd have to do a two-liner, I guess:

  python -c 'import sys,fileinput
  for line in fileinput.input(inplace=1): print line.strip()' file1 
file2 ...

-- 
-Chuck