Remove all whitespace from a directory

Hate it when people commit whitespace in a codebase? Why not kill it all? There's definitely a way to do this with sed(1) but this is my preferred workflow.

First, find all files inside your current directory:

find . -type f
#We don't care about directories

Then turn that output into a single line, space delimited list

find . -type f  | tr "\\n" " " 
#Turn all newline characters into a space

Now we have a list of files we can pipe into vi(m)

find . -type f  | tr "\\n" " " | xargs vim
#Start vim with the arglist populated with all of our files

Once vim loads, you can run a command over all the files you just gave it with:

:argdo

In our case, we want to remove trailing whitespace from each document:

:argdo %s/\s\+$//

Since we want to save the changes we've made we can also tell vim to write these files:

:argdo %s/\s\+$// | w

I also don't care about the files where no trailing whitespace was found, I pass it the "e" flag

:argdo %s/\s\+$//e | w
#See :help :s_flags for more info

Finally, If you don't care which files were changed you can call silent before the command

:silent argdo %s/\s\+$//e | w

I hope this helps someone!