Sybase Interview Question:

How do I bcp null dates in Sybase?

Submitted by: Administrator

As long as there is nothing between the field delimiters in your data, a null will be entered. If there's a space, the value will be Jan 1, 1900.

You can use sed(1) to squeeze blanks out of fields:
sed -e 's/|[ ]*|/||/g' old_file > new_file
Submitted by: Administrator