Christian Roy

As a follow up to my own post on Indentations: Tabs vs. Spaces, I wanted to cleanup a number of files that contained a lot of extra and useless whitespaces that were getting on my nerves.

I did not want to spend too much time on this so, here is what I did.

First, here is what I have in my .emacs files that is needed for this to work:

Then I used ack-grep (you can use find . -name '*.php' -exec) and xargs with emacs to clean it all up:

Here is the explanation:

ack -f --php project/lib

Finds all files endind with .php .phpt .php3 .php4 .php5 or .phtml (or more if you set it up) and print the file names from the project/lib folder.

| xargs -L1 -I{}

For every file outputed by ack, one by one execute the command (see below) and replace {} with the filename you get.

emacs -q -batch {}

The command being executed is emacs which is told NOT to load any init files but run a command in a batch mode (does not start the full editor).

-eval '(progn(load-file "~/.emacs")(php-mode)(whitespace-cleanup)(save-buffer))'

The emacs command being executed is in fact a set of commands. The first one is to load my .emacs files, then enter in php-mode, remove all the whitespaces and saves the file.

DONE

References:

• http://betterthangrep.com/
• http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?xargs
• http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/
• http://emacswiki.org/emacs/WhiteSpace