You have received some excellent suggestions already but, for the sake of completeness, here's a solution that also removes leading spaces if necessary. You can pre-compile a regular expression using qr{ ... } ( see Quote and Quote like Operators ) for use in a later match or substitution and you can use extended syntax to comment the expression. I prefer if possible to match only what we want to remove and replace it with nothing rather than matching what we want to remove and capturing what we want to keep, using the capture ( $1 etc. ) in the replacement part. We want to match spaces preceded by the beginning of the string OR spaces preceded by a single space OR spaces followed by the end of the string. To do this we can use zero-width look-behind and look-ahead assertions ( see "Lookaround Assertions" in Extended Patterns ) to match multiple spaces just where we want. This code:-

use strict;
use warnings;

use feature qw{ say };

my $str      =  q{  Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU          X5660  2.80GHz };
my $rxSpaces = qr{(?x)  # Use regex extended syntax to allow comments
   (?:                  # Open non-capturing group for alternation
      (?<= \A ) \s+     # Spaces preceded by beginning of string
      |                 # or
      (?<= \s ) \s+     # Spaces preceded by a single space
      |                 # or
      \s+ (?= \z )      # Spaces followed by end of string
   )                    # Close group
   };

# Replace matching spaces by nothing globally.
#
$str =~ s{$rxSpaces}{}g;
say qq{-->$str<--};
[download]

produces this output:-

-->Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5660 2.80GHz<--
[download]

I hope this is of interest.

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