git-stripspace

Name

git-stripspace - Remove unnecessary whitespace

Synopsis

git stripspace [-s | --strip-comments]
git stripspace [-c | --comment-lines]

Description

Read text, such as commit messages, notes, tags and branch descriptions, from the standard input and clean it in the manner used by Git.

With no arguments, this will:

remove trailing whitespace from all lines
collapse multiple consecutive empty lines into one empty line
remove empty lines from the beginning and end of the input
add a missing \n to the last line if necessary.

In the case where the input consists entirely of whitespace characters, no output will be produced.

NOTE: This is intended for cleaning metadata, prefer the --whitespace=fix mode of git-apply[1] for correcting whitespace of patches or files in the repository.

Options

-s
--strip-comments: Skip and remove all lines starting with comment character (default #).
-c
--comment-lines: Prepend comment character and blank to each line. Lines will automatically be terminated with a newline. On empty lines, only the comment character will be prepended.

Examples

Given the following noisy input with $ indicating the end of a line:

|A brief introduction   $
|   $
|$
|A new paragraph$
|# with a commented-out line    $
|explaining lots of stuff.$
|$
|# An old paragraph, also commented-out. $
|      $
|The end.$
|  $

Use git stripspace with no arguments to obtain:

|A brief introduction$
|$
|A new paragraph$
|# with a commented-out line$
|explaining lots of stuff.$
|$
|# An old paragraph, also commented-out.$
|$
|The end.$

Use git stripspace --strip-comments to obtain:

|A brief introduction$
|$
|A new paragraph$
|explaining lots of stuff.$
|$
|The end.$