How to remove 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.

Answer 1

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*'.