Remove Leading Whitespace from Bash Variable
If you have a variable with an unknown amount of leading whitespace, for example:
You can use this bash command to give you the value without any leading whitespaces
What is that?!
It's not nearly as complicated as it looks. The bash construct ${parameter##word} removes the longest matching prefix of the pattern word from the variable parameter. The pattern we use is *( ) which is bash speak for zero or more occurrences of space.
EDIT: If this doesn't seem to do anything at all, you might need to enable extglob. Do this by running the command shopt +s extglob before doing the substitution.
A neat hack
You can achieve a similar result by taking advantage of the way bash expands command arguments. echo Hello and echo Hello are both treated as calling echo with one parameter, Hello. That means to trim whitespace from a string, we can just echo it.
Be careful though. This will shorten all whitespace, so Hello World will become Hello World