When illustrating how to normalize the line endings, the documentation in gitattributes tells the user to `rm .git/index`. This is incorrect for two reasons: - Users shouldn't be instructed to mess around with the internal implementation of Git using raw file system tools like `rm`. - Within a submodule or an additional working tree `.git` is just a file containing a `gitdir: <path>` pointer into the real `.git` directory. Therefore `rm .git/index` does not work. The purpose or `rm .git/index` instruction is to remove all entries from the index without touching the working tree. The way to do this with Git is to use `read-tree --empty`. Signed-off-by: Andreas Heiduk <asheiduk@xxxxxxxxx> Helped-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> Helped-by: Torsten Bögershausen <tboegi@xxxxxx> --- Documentation/gitattributes.txt | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/Documentation/gitattributes.txt b/Documentation/gitattributes.txt index 473648386..2a2d7e2a4 100644 --- a/Documentation/gitattributes.txt +++ b/Documentation/gitattributes.txt @@ -229,7 +229,7 @@ From a clean working directory: ------------------------------------------------- $ echo "* text=auto" >.gitattributes -$ rm .git/index # Remove the index to re-scan the working directory +$ git read-tree --empty # Clean index, force re-scan of working directory $ git add . $ git status # Show files that will be normalized $ git commit -m "Introduce end-of-line normalization" -- 2.13.0