---
name: "git-stripspace"
section: "1"
platform: "linux"
package: "git"
version: "2.56.0-1"
release: "Arch Linux 2026-11-01"
platforms: ["linux"]
url: "https://new.carta.tech/git-stripspace"
---

# git-stripspace(1)

Remove unnecessary whitespace

## NAME

git-stripspace - Remove unnecessary whitespace

## SYNOPSIS

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

## DESCRIPTION

Read text, such as commit messages, notes, tags and branch descriptions, from the standard input and clean it in the manner used by Git.

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 [**git-apply**(1)](/git-apply/1.md) for correcting whitespace of patches or files in the repository.

## OPTIONS

- \-s, --strip-comments

  Skip and remove all lines starting with a comment character (**core.commentChar**, default #).

- \-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.

## 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.$
```

## GIT

Part of the [**git**(1)](/git/1.md) suite