How to remove trailing whitespace of all files recursively?

bash whitespace
iamjwc picture iamjwc · Sep 29, 2008 · Viewed 52.7k times · Source

How can you remove all of the trailing whitespace of an entire project? Starting at a root directory, and removing the trailing whitespace from all files in all folders.

Also, I want to to be able to modify the file directly, and not just print everything to stdout.

Answer

deepwell picture deepwell · Feb 26, 2011

Here is an OS X >= 10.6 Snow Leopard solution.

It Ignores .git and .svn folders and their contents. Also it won't leave a backup file.

export LC_CTYPE=C
export LANG=C
find . -not \( -name .svn -prune -o -name .git -prune \) -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i '' -E "s/[[:space:]]*$//"

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