Question

I and my collegues are having terrible trouble getting git to behave properly with certain files on our Windows repostiory clones. The clones have been made by cloning a repository which originates on an OSX machine. We have set autocrlf to true, but the problem is that we reguarly find files that git thinks are changed even though we never touch them (we don’t even open them in an editor.

The following output illustrates the issue: any ideas where I am going wrong?

$ git status                                                                                                 
# On branch master                                                                                           
# Your branch is behind 'origin/master' by 27 commits, and can be fast-forwarded.                            
#                                                                                                            
# Changed but not updated:                                                                                   
#   (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)                                               
#   (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)                                
#                                                                                                            
#       modified:   Web Applications/webclient/language/en/lang_copyitems.ini                                
#                                                                                                            
no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")                                            

Administrator@windows-dev ~/Documents/Workspace/prestige.git                                                 
$ git diff "Web Applications/webclient/language/en/lang_copyitems.ini"                                       
diff --git a/Web Applications/webclient/language/en/lang_copyitems.ini b/Web Applications/webclient/language/
index 800c188..ed11c0e 100644                                                                                
--- a/Web Applications/webclient/language/en/lang_copyitems.ini                                              
+++ b/Web Applications/webclient/language/en/lang_copyitems.ini                                              
@@ -1,12 +1,12 @@                                                                                            
-<EF><BB><BF>   [Header]                                                                                     
-       Description=Language strings for 'copyitems.php'                                                     
-                                                                                                            
-       [Messages]                                                                                           
-       300=Copy                                                                                             
-       301=Close                                                                                            
-       302=COPY STORIES                                                                                     
-       303=Name                                                                                             
-       304=In Queue                                                                                         
-       305=New Name                                                                                         
-       306=Items to Copy                                                                                    
-       308=This item has mandatory metadata fields that are not correctly set. Click any part of this messag
+<EF><BB><BF>   [Header]                                                                                     
+       Description=Language strings for 'copyitems.php'                                                     
+                                                                                                            
+       [Messages]                                                                                           
+       300=Copy                                                                                             
+       301=Close                                                                                            
+       302=COPY STORIES                                                                                     
+       303=Name                                                                                             
+       304=In Queue                                                                                         
+       305=New Name                                                                                         
+       306=Items to Copy                                                                                    
+       308=This item has mandatory metadata fields that are not correctly set. Click any part of this messag

Administrator@windows-dev ~/Documents/Workspace/prestige.git                                                 
$ git checkout HEAD "Web Applications/webclient/language/en/lang_copyitems.ini"                              

Administrator@windows-dev ~/Documents/Workspace/prestige.git                                                 
$ git status                                                                                                 
# On branch master                                                                                           
# Your branch is behind 'origin/master' by 27 commits, and can be fast-forwarded.                            
#                                                                                                            
# Changed but not updated:                                                                                   
#   (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)                                               
#   (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)                                
#                                                                                                            
#       modified:   Web Applications/webclient/language/en/lang_copyitems.ini                                
#

Answer 1

The problem with this settings, as illustrated by the GitHub guide is an automatic conversion is done during the checkout of the repository…

That means you do not need to open a file to trigger any change.

Is it not possible to keep autocrlf to false, and open those Windows files in editors able to respect the return line characters?

Note (illustrated here), if you need the conversion, except for some files, you could add a .gitattributes in the parent directory, with a:

myFile -crlf

In the file you set attributes to a path (or a pattern), or unset them (with the minus sign).
The crlf attribute is the attribute which tells if a file is affected by the core.autocrlf options. If you unset it, Git won’t mess with the line endings in the file