How to remove trailing whitespace of all files recursively?

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=Cexport LANG=Cfind . -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 9do    if [[ "$(file -bs --mime-type -- "$REPLY")" = text/* ]]    then        sed -i 's/[ \t]\+\(\r\?\)$/\1/' -- "$REPLY"    else        echo "Skipping $REPLY" >&2    fidone 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/'