How To Removing Trailing Whitespace Of All Files Recursively?

Question

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 1

In Bash:

find dir -type f -exec sed -i 's/ *$//' '{}' ';'

(Edit: doesn't give errors for directories; also now only removes trailing whitespace (previously it was removing leading and trailing whitespace))

Answer 2

Use:

find . -print0 |xargs -0 perl -pi.bak 's/ +$//'

if you don't want the ".bak" files generated:

find . -print0 |xargs -0 perl -pi 's/ +$//'

as a zsh user, you can omit the call to find, and instead use:

perl -pi 's/ +$//' **/*

Answer 3

This worked for me in OSX 10.5 Leopard, which does not use GNU sed or xargs.

find dir -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i .bak -E "s/[[:space:]]*$//"

Just be careful with this if you have files that need to be excluded (I did)!

You can use -prune to ignore certain directories or files. For Python files in a git repository, you could use something like:

find dir -not -path '.git' -iname '*.py'

Answer 4

I ended up not using find and not creating backup files.

sed -i '' 's/[[:space:]]*$//g' **/*.*

Depending on the depth of the file tree, this (shorter version) may be sufficient for your needs.

NOTE this also takes binary files, for instance.