leading space

Remove leading numbering from line

We had these log files that on most lines at the beginning there was a number followed by a dot and some times it had space characters.
The following sed command removes that prefix. and leaved intact the rest of the lines that do not have the prefix.

cat $log | sed '/^[0-9]*. */!d; s///;q';

e.g

Input: 123. Some text here.
Output:Some text here.

Remove leading whitespace (space and tabs) from line:

The following sed script will remove all leading whitespace from each line by using a regular expression to match space characters and tabs.

cat $log | sed 's/^[ t]*//';

e.g

Input:       Some text here.
Output:Some text here.