fix-whitespace-errors-throughout-branch-commits.md

Fix Whitespace Errors Throughout Branch Commits

Let's say we've been working on some changes to our repository on a branch. We've made several commits. We are close to putting up a PR, but we want to make sure everything is tidied up.

We run a check and see that there are some whitespace errors that should be fixed.

$ git diff main --check
README.md:1: trailing whitespace.
+# git-playground
script.sh:9: trailing whitespace.
+

This post isn't able to show the highlighted whitespace errors, but we can see the warnings above.

Rather than cluttering things with an additional commit that fixes these errors or manually cleaning up each commit, we can ask git to fix it for us.

$ git rebase --whitespace=fix main

That will do a manual rebase of each commit addressing the whitespace errors.

We can run the error check again and see no output, which means we are good to go.

$ git diff main --check

See the section on --whitespace in man git-apply for more details.

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