Tip for the day: ELIMINATING MULTIPLE SPACES

Here is a simple script which helps in eliminating multiple spaces when one wants to extract a particular column in a set of records from a file.

Here is an example to prove the same:

ps -u $LOGNAME | tr -s " " : | cut -d: -f

The above script line can be used to extract a column from the output of a ps command for a particular user ($LOGNAME).