Cleanup whitespace Sed Templates

Why this topic matters

Templates for removing empty lines, trimming trailing spaces, and rewriting line starts to keep files clean and consistent.

This topic page groups together whitespace cleanup searches such as deleting empty lines, normalizing whitespace, collapsing multiple spaces, and preserving cleaner paragraph spacing.

Templates in this topic

Delete empty linesCleanup Remove duplicate blank linesCleanup Collapse multiple spacesCleanup Normalize whitespaceCleanup Remove trailing spacesCleanup Remove leading comment markersRewrite

Templates in this topic

Templates for removing empty lines, trimming trailing spaces, and rewriting line starts to keep files clean and consistent.

Delete empty lines

Cleanup

Remove blank and whitespace-only lines.

sed '/^\s*$/d'

Remove duplicate blank lines

Cleanup

Collapse repeated blank lines so only one empty row remains.

sed '/^$/N;/^\n$/D'

Collapse multiple spaces

Cleanup

Collapse repeated spaces into a single space while keeping line structure.

sed 's/  */ /g'

Normalize whitespace

Cleanup

Collapse repeated spaces and tabs into one clean separator.

sed 's/[[:space:]]\+/ /g'

Remove trailing spaces

Cleanup

Delete trailing spaces and tabs at the end of each line.

sed 's/[[:space:]]\+$//'

Remove leading comment markers

Rewrite

Remove the leading # and following spaces from each line.

sed 's/^#\s*//'