i new at this so hav been tryin everythin i can find by googling the problem
#sed 's/ //g' oldfile > newfile
#sed '$s/ \+//g' oldfile > newfile
and quite a few others similar to this.
one thing that did seem strange is if i do the first one i mentioned it will do the top line i.e www1=www1 but all the rest of the lines remain the same but if i again do the first one i mentioned but do #sed 's/www/hello/g' oldfile > newfile
it successfully changes all the www's to hello.
In my books thats strange but like i said im a newbie
Hi the problem was that one of the commands i used earlier seems to have converted it from tab to spaces and now that i reverted to the original it has gone back to tabs hence removing spaces was not working. in the end i used:
in vi
:%s/\t//g
thanks for the speed of your replys it was greatly appreciated