NAME
----
-git-stripspace - Filter out empty lines
+git-stripspace - Remove unnecessary whitespace
SYNOPSIS
--------
-'git stripspace' [-s | --strip-comments] < <stream>
+[verse]
+'git stripspace' [-s | --strip-comments] < input
DESCRIPTION
-----------
-Remove multiple empty lines, and empty lines at beginning and end.
+
+Clean the input in the manner used by 'git' for text such as commit
+messages, notes, tags and branch descriptions.
+
+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.
+
+*NOTE*: This is intended for cleaning metadata, prefer the `--whitespace=fix`
+mode of linkgit:git-apply[1] for correcting whitespace of patches or files in
+the repository.
OPTIONS
-------
-s::
--strip-comments::
- In addition to empty lines, also strip lines starting with '#'.
+ Skip and remove all lines starting with '#'.
-<stream>::
- Byte stream to act on.
+EXAMPLES
+--------
-Author
-------
-Written by Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
+Given the following noisy input with '$' indicating the end of a line:
-Documentation
---------------
-Documentation by Junio C Hamano and the git-list <git@vger.kernel.org>.
+--------
+|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.$
+---------
GIT
---