[lug] Stripping whitespace in a shell script

[Riggs, Rob]

I'm looking for an effecient way to strip whitespace from the trailing end
of a line of text in a shell script.

I was using "awk '{print $1}'", but it breaks down when there is embedded
whitespace in the text, spitting out only the portion prior to the first
embedded whitespace. While whitespace should not be embedded, it occurs
frequently enough that I need to deal with it. 

Any suggestions on how to do it in Bash script?

-Rob