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

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.

Answer 2

1) Many other answers use -E. I am not sure why, as that's undocumented BSD compatibility option. -r should be used instead.

2) Other answers use -i ''. That should be just -i (or -i'' if preffered), because -i has the suffix right after.

3) Git specific solution:

git config --global alias.check-whitespace \
'git diff-tree --check $(git hash-object -t tree /dev/null) HEAD'

git check-whitespace | grep trailing | cut -d: -f1 | uniq -u -z | xargs -0 sed --in-place -e 's/[ \t]+$//'

The first one registers a git alias check-whitespace which lists the files with trailing whitespaces. The second one runs sed on them.

I only use \t rather than [:space:] as I don't typically see vertical tabs, form feeds and non-breakable spaces. Your measurement may vary.

Answer 3

This is what works for me (Mac OS X 10.8, GNU sed installed by Homebrew):

find . -path ./vendor -prune -o \
  \( -name '*.java' -o -name '*.xml' -o -name '*.css' \) \
  -exec gsed -i -E 's/\t/    /' \{} \; \
  -exec gsed -i -E 's/[[:space:]]*$//' \{} \; \
  -exec gsed -i -E 's/\r\n/\n/' \{} \;

Removed trailing spaces, replaces tabs with spaces, replaces Windows CRLF with Unix \n.

What's interesting is that I have to run this 3-4 times before all files get fixed, by all cleaning gsed instructions.