Read已经修整了空白，所以在bash中你可以这样做:

$ read foo <<< "   foo  bar   two spaces follow   "
$ echo ".$foo."
.foo  bar   two spaces follow.

POSIX兼容的版本稍长一些

$ read foo << END
   foo  bar   two spaces follow   
END
$ echo ".$foo."
.foo  bar   two spaces follow.

我将简单地使用sed:

function trim
{
    echo "$1" | sed -n '1h;1!H;${;g;s/^[ \t]*//g;s/[ \t]*$//g;p;}'
}

a)单行字符串使用示例

string='    wordA wordB  wordC   wordD    '
trimmed=$( trim "$string" )

echo "GIVEN STRING: |$string|"
echo "TRIMMED STRING: |$trimmed|"

输出:

GIVEN STRING: |    wordA wordB  wordC   wordD    |
TRIMMED STRING: |wordA wordB  wordC   wordD|

b)多行字符串使用示例

string='    wordA
   >wordB<
wordC    '
trimmed=$( trim "$string" )

echo -e "GIVEN STRING: |$string|\n"
echo "TRIMMED STRING: |$trimmed|"

输出:

GIVEN STRING: |    wordAA
   >wordB<
wordC    |

TRIMMED STRING: |wordAA
   >wordB<
wordC|

c)最后说明: 如果你不喜欢使用函数，对于单行字符串，你可以简单地使用“更容易记住”的命令，比如:

echo "$string" | sed -e 's/^[ \t]*//' | sed -e 's/[ \t]*$//'

例子:

echo "   wordA wordB wordC   " | sed -e 's/^[ \t]*//' | sed -e 's/[ \t]*$//'

输出:

wordA wordB wordC

在多行字符串上使用上述方法也可以，但请注意，它也会切断任何尾随/前导内部多行空间，就像GuruM在评论中注意到的那样

string='    wordAA
    >four spaces before<
 >one space before<    '
echo "$string" | sed -e 's/^[ \t]*//' | sed -e 's/[ \t]*$//'

输出:

wordAA
>four spaces before<
>one space before<

所以如果你介意保留这些空格，请使用我回答开头的函数!

d)解释sed语法“find and replace”在函数trim中使用的多行字符串:

sed -n '
# If the first line, copy the pattern to the hold buffer
1h
# If not the first line, then append the pattern to the hold buffer
1!H
# If the last line then ...
$ {
    # Copy from the hold to the pattern buffer
    g
    # Do the search and replace
    s/^[ \t]*//g
    s/[ \t]*$//g
    # print
    p
}'

var = '  a b  '
# remove all white spaces
new=$(echo $var |  tr -d ' ')
# remove leading and trailing whitespaces
new=$(echo $var)

ab
a b

一个简单的答案是:

echo "   lol  " | xargs

Xargs将为您做修剪。这是一个命令/程序，没有参数，返回修剪后的字符串，就这么简单!

注意:这并没有删除所有的内部空格，所以“foo bar”保持不变;它不会变成“foobar”。但是，多个空格将被压缩为单个空格，因此“foo bar”将变成“foo bar”。此外，它不会删除行尾字符。

答案有很多，但我仍然认为我刚刚写的剧本值得一提，因为:

it was successfully tested in the shells bash/dash/busybox shell it is extremely small it doesn't depend on external commands and doesn't need to fork (->fast and low resource usage) it works as expected: it strips all spaces and tabs from beginning and end, but not more important: it doesn't remove anything from the middle of the string (many other answers do), even newlines will remain special: the "$*" joins multiple arguments using one space. if you want to trim & output only the first argument, use "$1" instead if doesn't have any problems with matching file name patterns etc

脚本:

trim() {
  local s2 s="$*"
  until s2="${s#[[:space:]]}"; [ "$s2" = "$s" ]; do s="$s2"; done
  until s2="${s%[[:space:]]}"; [ "$s2" = "$s" ]; do s="$s2"; done
  echo "$s"
}

用法:

mystring="   here     is
    something    "
mystring=$(trim "$mystring")
echo ">$mystring<"

输出:

>here     is
    something<

为了删除字符串开头和结尾的所有空格(包括行末字符):

echo $variable | xargs echo -n

这也将删除重复的空格:

echo "  this string has a lot       of spaces " | xargs echo -n

Produces: 'this string has a lot of spaces'