How to remove trailing whitespaces with sed?

Question

I have a simple shell script that removes trailing whitespace from a file. Is there any way to make this script more compact (without creating a temporary file)?

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Answer 1

To only strip whitespaces (in my case spaces and tabs) from lines with at least one non-whitespace character (this way empty indented lines are not touched):

sed -i -r 's/([^ \t]+)[ \t]+$/\1/' "$file"