How to remove trailing whitespace of all files recursively?

iamjwc_19718 0
Viewed 57140

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.

whitespace bash
15 Answers

Use:

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

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

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

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

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

Note: To prevent destroying .git directory, try adding: -not -iwholename '*.git*'.

user_205550

Two alternative approaches which also work with DOS newlines (CR/LF) and do a pretty good job at avoiding binary files:

Generic solution which checks that the MIME type starts with text/:

while IFS= read -r -d '' -u 9
do
    if [[ "$(file -bs --mime-type -- "$REPLY")" = text/* ]]
    then
        sed -i 's/[ \t]\+\(\r\?\)$/\1/' -- "$REPLY"
    else
        echo "Skipping $REPLY" >&2
    fi
done 9< <(find . -type f -print0)

Git repository-specific solution by Mat which uses the -I option of git grep to skip files which Git considers to be binary:

git grep -I --name-only -z -e '' | xargs -0 sed -i 's/[ \t]\+\(\r\?\)$/\1/'
user_965880

In Bash:

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

Note: If you're using .git repository, try adding: -not -iwholename '.git'.

Adam_Rosenfield_95300

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'
user_703500

Instead of excluding files, here is a variation of the above the explicitly white lists the files, based on file extension, that you want to strip, feel free to season to taste:

find . \( -name *.rb -or -name *.html -or -name *.js -or -name *.coffee -or \
-name *.css -or -name *.scss -or -name *.erb -or -name *.yml -or -name *.ru \) \
-print0 | xargs -0 sed -i '' -E "s/[[:space:]]*$//"
user_616140

I use regular expressions. 4 steps:

  1. Open the root folder in your editor (I use Visual Studio Code).
  2. Tap the Search icon on the left, and enable the regular expression mode.
  3. Enter " +\n" in the Search bar and "\n" in the Replace bar.
  4. Click "Replace All".

This removes all trailing spaces at the end of each line in all files. And you can exclude some files that don't fit with this need.

user_101758850
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