Are there any tools / UNIX single liners which would remove trailing whitespaces for multiple files in-place.
E.g. one that could be used in the conjunction with find.
You want
sed --in-place 's/[[:space:]]\+$//' file
That will delete all POSIX standard defined whitespace characters, including vertical tab and form feed. Also, it will only do a replacement if the trailing whitespace actually exists, unlike the other answers that use the zero or more matcher (*
).
--in-place
is simply the long form of -i
. I prefer to use the long form in scripts because it tends to be more illustrative of what the flag actually does.
It can be easily integrated with find
like so:
find . -type f -name '*.txt' -exec sed --in-place 's/[[:space:]]\+$//' {} \+
As pointed out in the comments, the above doesn't work if you don't have gnu tools installed. If that's the case, you can use the following:
find . -iname '*.txt' -type f -exec sed -i '' 's/[[:space:]]\{1,\}$//' {} \+