QUERY: strip trailing whitespace ... woes :S

kevingpo · 02-20-2006, 06:18 AM

I am wondering about what's the best and easiest way to strip trailing whitespace from every single file in a folder, recursively.

I want to write a program/script so that you pass in a folder name and it'll recursively go through all sub-folders and strips trailing whitespace from every single file.

Trailing whitespace includes:

1. whitespaces at end of text lines, strip whitespace but retain text
2. whitespaces on empty lines, strip whitespace but leave the empty line

alienDog · 02-20-2006, 06:57 AM

Homework?

You could create a tempfile that lists all the files recursively with find. Then make a for loop go through the tempfile and check the types of all the files listed in it with the file command (or you could simply have find only find .txt files if that's approproate). Finally just sed the files that are text.

Hko · 02-20-2006, 07:20 AM

What scripting/programming language?

Assuming a shell script:
find allows you to recursively go through all files in adirectory tree. Use its -exec option to execute a command on each file.

In that command rename the file to <original name>.old (or similar), run a sed command to strip off the whitespace of the file's contents redirecting the output of sed to a new file with the original name, and finally delete the original file (xxx.old).

Should be doable in a (long) one-liner.

bigearsbilly · 02-20-2006, 08:15 AM

look at something like
perl -pi -e 's/ *$//'