GIT-STRIPSPACE(1)

✨ NAME ✨

okay bestie, this is the GIT-STRIPSPACE(1) page — aka git-stripspace in the Git manual — and “Remove unnecessary whitespace” is the whole assignment 💅.

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🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

git stripspace [-s | --strip-comments]
git stripspace [-c | --comment-lines]

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

So you're reading text, such as commit messages, notes, tags and branch descriptions, from the standard input and cleaning it in the manner used by Git. Iconic behavior, honestly.

With no arguments, this will:

• remove trailing whitespace from all lines
• collapse multiple consecutive empty lines into one empty line
• remove empty lines from the beginning and end of the input
• add a missing \n to the last line if necessary.

In the case where the input consists entirely of whitespace characters, no output will be produced — like, nothing, bestie 😭.

NOTE: This is intended for cleaning metadata. Prefer the --whitespace=fix mode of git-apply(1) for correcting whitespace of patches or files in the repository.

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• -s, --strip-comments — Skip and remove all lines starting with a comment character (core.commentChar, default #). If it starts with the comment char, it is outta here.
• -c, --comment-lines — Prepend the comment character and a blank space to each line. Lines will automatically be terminated with a newline. On empty lines, only the comment character will be prepended. Comment glow-up unlocked ✨

🌈 EXAMPLES 🌈

Given the following noisy input with $ indicating the end of a line:

|A brief introduction   $
|   $
|$
|A new paragraph$
|# with a commented-out line    $
|explaining lots of stuff.$
|$
|# An old paragraph, also commented-out. $
|      $
|The end.$
|  $

Use git stripspace with no arguments to obtain:

|A brief introduction$
|$
|A new paragraph$
|# with a commented-out line$
|explaining lots of stuff.$
|$
|# An old paragraph, also commented-out.$
|$
|The end.$

Use git stripspace --strip-comments to obtain:

|A brief introduction$
|$
|A new paragraph$
|explaining lots of stuff.$
|$
|The end.$

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🧚 GIT 🧚

Part of the git(1) suite. You already know.

okay bye bestie — this page is from Git 2.56.0, dated 2026-09-27, and that's the whole vibe 💖✨🫶