Sometimes a data file contains whitespace before the actual data. The following command will remove that whitespace.

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cat original_file.txt | sed -e 's,^ *,,' > new_file.txt

The following command will substitute all tabs & spaces in a file with just spaces. Very usefull if you want to prepare a file as csv or inject the data contained in a database table.

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sed -r 's/[[:blank:]]/ /g' original_file > new_file