Commit encoding change

Question

I have some files with us-ascii encoding committed to repository. When I change encoding to utf-8 I cannot commit, because I get:

$ git status
# On branch master
nothing to commit (working directory clean)

How can I commit such changes?

Answer 1

The 6 year old comment from @reactormonk worked for me. I put a comment in the file, where the comment had a UTF-8 character. Committing that change set the file encoding to UTF-8.