diffutils: Trailing Blanks
5.2 Omitting trailing blanks
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When outputting lines in normal or context format, or outputting an
unchanged line in unified format, 'diff' normally outputs a blank just
before each line. If the line is empty, the output of 'diff' therefore
contains trailing blanks even though the input does not contain them.
For example, when outputting an unchanged empty line in context format,
'diff' normally outputs a line with two leading spaces.
Some text editors and email agents routinely delete trailing blanks,
so it can be a problem to deal with diff output files that contain them.
You can avoid this problem with the '--suppress-blank-empty' option. It
causes 'diff' to omit trailing blanks at the end of output lines in
normal, context, and unified format, unless the trailing blanks were
already present in the input. This changes the output format slightly,
so that output lines are guaranteed to never end in a blank unless an
input line ends in a blank. This format is less likely to be munged by
text editors or by transmission via email. It is accepted by GNU
'patch' as well.
Info Catalog
diffutils: Tabs
diffutils: Adjusting Output
diffutils: Pagination