Sometimes a variable can be returned with a few empty (whitespace) characters in front of it. This is not too much of an issue when running individual commands ending in a | wc -l to count the number of lines, but when you want to sandwich the variable in between two words in a more meaningful echo statement in a script, that “gap” between the words and the numbers looks untidy. To remove the preceeding whitespace, append the following into the command used to build the variable (between the back ticks ` `).
sed -e ‘s/^[ \t]*//’
e.g. to count the number of folders…
FOLDERCOUNT=`ls -l $SOURCE | grep ^d | wc -l | sed -e ‘s/^[ \t]*//’`
echo “The $FOLDERCOUNT source folders are…”
Will output this…
The 4 source folders are…
instead of this…
The 4 source folders are…
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