Git: Removing carriage returns from source-controlled files

Question

I've got a Git repository that has some files with DOS format (\r\n line endings). I would like to just run the files through dos2unix (which would change all files to UNIX format, with \n line endings), but how badly would this affect history, and is it recommended at all?

I assume that the standard is to always use UNIX line endings for source-controlled files, and optionally switch to OS-specific line endings locally?

Answer 1

This crlf thing drove us crazy when we converted from svn to git (in a central (bare) like) scm environment. The thing that ultimately got us was we copied the global .gitconfig file to everyone's user root (yep both windows and linux) with the initial one coming from a Windows system and having core.autocrlf=true and core.safecrlf=false which played havoc on the linux users (like bash scripts didn't work and all those awful ^M's). So we initially did a checkout and clone script that did a dos2unix after these commands. Then I ran across the core.autocrlf and core.safecrlf config items and set them based on the O/S:

Windows: core.autocrlf=true and core.safecrlf=false Linux: core.autocrlf=input and core.safecrlf=false

These were set with: ---on Windows---

git config --global core.autocrlf true
git config --global core.safecrlf false

---on Linux---

git config --global core.autocrlf input
git config --global core.safecrlf false

Then for our Linux developers we setup a little bash script /usr/local/bin/gitfixcrlf:

#!/bin/sh
# remove local tree
git ls-files -z | xargs -0 rm
# checkout with proper crlf
git checkout .

Which they only had to run on their local sandbox clones once. Any future cloning was done correctly. Any future push pulls now were handled correctly. So, this solved our multiple O/S issues with linefeeds. Also Note that Mac falls in the same config as Linux.