Striping starting and trailing character of each line in a file

sed -i.backup 's/^.\(.*\).$/\1/' filename

sed -i.backup 's/^.\(.*\)".$/\1/'  filename

Useful SED Examples

Append string on each line in a given file:
# sed 's/$/<string>/'  file.txt

A sample PowerCLI script for iterating multiple vCenters

Add-PsSnapin VMware.vimAutomation.core
$vcs=@()
$vcs +="vCenter1"
$vcs +="vCenter2"
$vcs +="vCenter3"
foreach ($vc in $vcs)
{
"Connecting to $vc"
Connect-VIServer -server $vc -user xxx -password xxx
"Connected to $vc"
}
...
Disconnect-VIServer *

Some SED tips for my records

To delete trailing whitespace from end of each line:
# sed 's/[ \t]*$//' filename > filename_notrailingspace

To remove all blank lines:
# sed '/^$/d' filename > filename_noblankspace

To remove all leading and trailing whitespace from end of each line:
$ cat filename | sed 's/^[ \t]*//;s/[ \t]*$//' > filename_nospace