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

ex

Try using Ex editor (part of Vim):

$ ex +'bufdo!%s/\s\+$//e' -cxa **/*.*

^{Note: For recursion (bash4 & zsh), we use a new globbing option (**/*.*). Enable by shopt -s globstar.}

You may add the following function into your .bash_profile:

# Strip trailing whitespaces.
# Usage: trim *.*
# See: https://stackoverflow.com/q/10711051/55075
trim() {
  ex +'bufdo!%s/\s\+$//e' -cxa $*
}

sed

For using sed, check: How to remove trailing whitespaces with sed?

find

Find the following script (e.g. remove_trail_spaces.sh) for removing trailing whitespaces from the files:

#!/bin/sh
# Script to remove trailing whitespace of all files recursively
# See: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/149057/how-to-remove-trailing-whitespace-of-all-files-recursively

case "$OSTYPE" in
  darwin*) # OSX 10.5 Leopard, which does not use GNU sed or xargs.
    find . -type f -not -iwholename '*.git*' -print0  | xargs -0 sed -i .bak -E "s/[[:space:]]*$//"
    find . -type f -name \*.bak -print0 | xargs -0 rm -v
    ;;
  *)
    find . -type f -not -iwholename '*.git*' -print0 | xargs -0 perl -pi -e 's/ +$//'
esac

Run this script from the directory which you want to scan. On OSX at the end, it will remove all the files ending with .bak.

Or just:

find . -type f -name "*.java" -exec perl -p -i -e "s/[ \t]$//g" {} \;

which is recommended way by Spring Framework Code Style.