trailing-whitespace

This file contains lines with trailing whitespace characters.

Whilst often harmless and unsightly, such extra whitespaces can also cause tools to interpret the whitespace characters literally. The tool diff(1) does not like them, either. They are best avoided.

Some of these problems can be hard to track down.

Whitespace at the end of lines may be removed with the following:

$ sed -i -e 's@[[:space:]]*$@@g' debian/control debian/changelog

If you use Emacs, you can also use "M-x wh-cl" (whitespace-cleanup).

However, if you wish to only remove trailing spaces and leave trailing tabs (eg. for Makefiles), you can use the following code snippet:

$ sed -i -e 's@[ ]*$@@g' debian/rules

To remove empty lines from the end of a file, you can use:

$ sed -i -e :a -e '/^\n*$/{$d;N;};/\n$/ba' debian/rules
Severity: pedantic
Experimental: false
Renamed from: file-contains-trailing-whitespace

See also