Files showing as modified directly after a Git clone

Question

I had the same problem on the Mac after cloning a repository. It would assume all files had been changed.

After running git config --global core.autocrlf input, it was still marking all files as changed. After looking for a fix I came across .gitattributes file in the home directory which had the following.

* text=auto

I commented it out and any other cloned repositories from now on were working fine.

I got it. All the other developers are on Ubuntu (I think) and thus have case-sensitive file systems. I, however, do not (as I'm on a Mac). Indeed, all the files had lowercase twins when I took a look at them using git ls-tree HEAD <path>.

I'll get one of them to sort it out.

git config core.fileMode false

solved this problem in my case

https://git-scm.com/docs/git-config

TL;DR;

core.fileMode

If false, the executable bit differences between the index and the working tree are ignored; useful on broken filesystems like FAT. See git-update-index(1).

The default is true, except git-clone(1) or git-init(1) will probe and set core.fileMode false if appropriate when the repository is created.

I assume you are using Windows. That GitHub page you linked to has the details backwards. The problem is that CR + LF line endings have been committed to the repository already and because you have core.autocrlf set to either true or input, Git wants to convert the line-endings to LF, so git status shows that every file is changed.

If this is a repository that you only want to access, but have no involvement with, you can run the following command to merely hide the issue without actually solving it.

git config core.autocrlf false

---

If this is a repository that you will be actively involved in and can commit changes to. You may wish to fix the problem by making a commit that changes all the line endings in the repository to use LF instead of CR + LF and then take steps to prevent it from happening again in the future.

The following is taken directly from the gitattributes man page and should be preformed from a clean working directory.

echo "* text=auto" >>.gitattributes
rm .git/index     # Remove the index to force Git to
git reset         # re-scan the working directory.
git status        # Show files that will be normalized.
git add -u
git add .gitattributes
git commit -m "Introduce end-of-line normalization"

If any files that should not be normalized show up in git status, unset their text attribute before running git add -u.

manual.pdf      -text

Conversely, text files that Git does not detect can have normalization enabled manually.

weirdchars.txt  text

Please run the following commands. That might solve the issue.

# Remove everything from the index.
git rm --cached -r .

# Write both the index and working directory from git's database.
git reset --hard