What will `* text=auto eol=lf` in gitattributes do?

git gitattributes
Borek Bernard picture Borek Bernard · Apr 3, 2015 · Viewed 10.7k times · Source

We have this in our .gitattributes file:

* text=auto eol=lf

I'd like to precisely understand what this does.

The first part is text=auto. From the documentation:

This ensures that all files that Git considers to be text will have normalized (LF) line endings in the repository.

The important part is that Git does the normalization only for files that it detects as text files.

However, I'm not sure about the eol=lf part. I would think that it will also do the normalization only for text files but I can't find support for it in the documentation and we had an instance when our PNG files were normalized too, making them invalid.

Is there a settings like the above that would basically say "do the normalization in both directions for text files, and leave binary files alone"?

Answer

Borek Bernard picture Borek Bernard · Dec 5, 2016

Git 2.10 fixed this and now behaves as one would expect.

Related questions

What is the purpose of `text=auto` in `.gitattributes` file?

Mostly .gitattributes file has * text=auto. What is the purpose of text=auto in that file?

Read More
How to normalize working tree line endings in Git?

I have cloned a repository that had inconsistend line endings. I have added a .gitattributes that sets the text attribute for the files I want to normalize. Now when I commit changes I get the message: warning: CRLF will be …

Read More
Where should I place my global 'gitattributes' file?

I gather there is (despite the lack of documentation) a way to set Git attributes globally; but I'm not clear where to place the necessary gitattributes file. The instructions say they belong in $(prefix)/etc/gitattributes But where is $(prefix)? …

Read More