First, did you look if the filename itself contains a trailing whitespace? I had this issue a few times myself, thinking the script is broken, but in fact the file on the filesystem had a space. That is annoying. If your variable has an additional space and you want to remove it, then I think its better to find out where this space comes from (if its not the file itself), and solve the issue there. Because if you get an unexpected space, then this could be a bug in your script somewhere. There are multiple ways to remove leading and trailing whitespaces with Bash. The best is not to call a command for this and rely on Bash substitution. This can get ugly, but luckily we can steal from Stack Overflow, :p (basically what we did before Ai): trim() { local var="$*" # remove leading whitespace characters var="${var#"${var%%[![:space:]]*}"}" # remove trailing whitespace characters var="${var%"${var##*[![:space:]]}"}" printf '%s' "$var" } stackoverflow.com/…/how-can-i-trim-whitespace-fro… (who got it from another source,