Convert indentation in entire folder

Question

I'm working in a large project with ~35,500 files and I want o know if I cold convert the indentation of the entire project. I know I can do

unexpand -t 4 <file>

but I can't run it for every single file.

I was thinking about some way of doing it with tree, which I know I can manipulate to print every file name with complete path... or does someone know a shell program that can iterate over all files in folder and subfolders so I could use unexpand?

Answer 1

As unexpand does not have an overwrite option, please try:

#!/bin/bash

dir="."
while read -r -d "" file; do
    tmpfile=$(mktemp /tmp/tempfile.XXXXXX)
    unexpand -t 4 "$file" > "$tmpfile"
    cp --preserve=all --attributes-only -- "$file" "$tmpfile"  # will work with GNU cp only
    mv -f -- "$tmpfile" "$file"
done < <(find "$dir" -type f -print0)

The line starts with cp just copies the attributes of the original one. You can comment-out the line if it does not work.
Please make sure to back up the original files before execution.