LINTIAN

# `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

- list of all the affected packages
- the source of this tag