How to remove trailing whitespace of all files recursively?

Question

Here is an OS X >= 10.6 Snow Leopard solution.

It Ignores .git and .svn folders and their contents. Also it won't leave a backup file.

export LC_CTYPE=C
export LANG=C
find . -not \( -name .svn -prune -o -name .git -prune \) -type f -print0 | perl -0ne 'print if -T' | xargs -0 sed -Ei 's/[[:blank:]]+$//'

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*'.

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/'

In Bash:

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

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

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'