bash - 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.

Also, I want to to be able to modify the file directly, and not just print everything to stdout.

Answer 1

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:]]+$//'