linux - How can I trim white space from a variable in awk?

Question

Suppose $2 is my variable. I have tried going from

awk -F, '{print $2 ":"}'

to

awk -F, '{print gsub(/[ ]+$/, "", $2) ":"}'

But it goes from printing something to printing nothing at all.

Answer 1

You're printing the result of the gsub, but gsub does an in-place modify of $2 instead of returning a modified copy. Call gsub, then print:

awk -F, '{gsub(/[ ]+$/, "", $2); print $2 ":"}'