Tag: trailing-whitespace Severity: pedantic Check: debian/trailing-whitespace Renamed-From: file-contains-trailing-whitespace Explanation: 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