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GITATTRIBUTES(5) | Git Manual | GITATTRIBUTES(5) |
NAME¶
gitattributes - defining attributes per pathSYNOPSIS¶
$GIT_DIR/info/attributes, .gitattributesDESCRIPTION¶
A gitattributes file is a simple text file that gives attributes to pathnames. Each line in gitattributes file is of form:pattern attr1 attr2 ...
The path has the attribute with special value
"true"; this is specified by listing only the name of the attribute
in the attribute list.
Unset
The path has the attribute with special value
"false"; this is specified by listing the name of the attribute
prefixed with a dash - in the attribute list.
Set to a value
The path has the attribute with specified string value;
this is specified by listing the name of the attribute followed by an equal
sign = and its value in the attribute list.
Unspecified
No pattern matches the path, and nothing says if the path
has or does not have the attribute, the attribute for the path is said to be
Unspecified.
When more than one pattern matches the path, a later line overrides an earlier
line. This overriding is done per attribute. The rules how the pattern matches
paths are the same as in .gitignore files; see gitignore(5).
Unlike .gitignore, negative patterns are forbidden.
When deciding what attributes are assigned to a path, Git consults
$GIT_DIR/info/attributes file (which has the highest precedence),
.gitattributes file in the same directory as the path in question, and
its parent directories up to the toplevel of the work tree (the further the
directory that contains .gitattributes is from the path in question,
the lower its precedence). Finally global and system-wide files are considered
(they have the lowest precedence).
When the .gitattributes file is missing from the work tree, the path in
the index is used as a fall-back. During checkout process,
.gitattributes in the index is used and then the file in the working
tree is used as a fall-back.
If you wish to affect only a single repository (i.e., to assign attributes to
files that are particular to one user’s workflow for that repository),
then attributes should be placed in the $GIT_DIR/info/attributes file.
Attributes which should be version-controlled and distributed to other
repositories (i.e., attributes of interest to all users) should go into
.gitattributes files. Attributes that should affect all repositories
for a single user should be placed in a file specified by the
core.attributesFile configuration option (see git-config(1)).
Its default value is $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/attributes. If $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is
either not set or empty, $HOME/.config/git/attributes is used instead.
Attributes for all users on a system should be placed in the
$(prefix)/etc/gitattributes file.
Sometimes you would need to override an setting of an attribute for a path to
Unspecified state. This can be done by listing the name of the
attribute prefixed with an exclamation point !.
EFFECTS¶
Certain operations by Git can be influenced by assigning particular attributes to a path. Currently, the following operations are attributes-aware.Checking-out and checking-in¶
These attributes affect how the contents stored in the repository are copied to the working tree files when commands such as git checkout and git merge run. They also affect how Git stores the contents you prepare in the working tree in the repository upon git add and git commit.
This attribute enables and controls end-of-line normalization. When a text file
is normalized, its line endings are converted to LF in the repository. To
control what line ending style is used in the working directory, use the
eol attribute for a single file and the core.eol configuration
variable for all text files. Note that core.autocrlf overrides
core.eol
Set
Setting the text attribute on a path enables
end-of-line normalization and marks the path as a text file. End-of-line
conversion takes place without guessing the content type.
Unset
Unsetting the text attribute on a path tells Git
not to attempt any end-of-line conversion upon checkin or checkout.
Set to string value "auto"
When text is set to "auto", the path is
marked for automatic end-of-line conversion. If Git decides that the content
is text, its line endings are converted to LF on checkin. When the file has
been committed with CRLF, no conversion is done.
Unspecified
If the text attribute is unspecified, Git uses the
core.autocrlf configuration variable to determine if the file should be
converted.
Any other value causes Git to act as if text has been left
unspecified.
This attribute sets a specific line-ending style to be used in the working
directory. It enables end-of-line conversion without any content checks,
effectively setting the text attribute.
Set to string value "crlf"
This setting forces Git to normalize line endings for
this file on checkin and convert them to CRLF when the file is checked
out.
Set to string value "lf"
This setting forces Git to normalize line endings to LF
on checkin and prevents conversion to CRLF when the file is checked out.
For backwards compatibility, the crlf attribute is interpreted as
follows:
crlf text -crlf -text crlf=input eol=lf
While Git normally leaves file contents alone, it can be configured to normalize
line endings to LF in the repository and, optionally, to convert them to CRLF
when files are checked out.
If you simply want to have CRLF line endings in your working directory
regardless of the repository you are working with, you can set the config
variable "core.autocrlf" without using any attributes.
This does not force normalization of text files, but does ensure that text files
that you introduce to the repository have their line endings normalized to LF
when they are added, and that files that are already normalized in the
repository stay normalized.
If you want to ensure that text files that any contributor introduces to the
repository have their line endings normalized, you can set the text
attribute to "auto" for all files.
The attributes allow a fine-grained control, how the line endings are converted.
Here is an example that will make Git normalize .txt, .vcproj and .sh files,
ensure that .vcproj files have CRLF and .sh files have LF in the working
directory, and prevent .jpg files from being normalized regardless of their
content.
Note
When text=auto conversion is enabled in a cross-platform project using
push and pull to a central repository the text files containing CRLFs should
be normalized.
From a clean working directory:
If any files that should not be normalized show up in git status, unset
their text attribute before running git add -u.
Conversely, text files that Git does not detect can have normalization enabled
manually.
If core.safecrlf is set to "true" or "warn", Git
verifies if the conversion is reversible for the current setting of
core.autocrlf. For "true", Git rejects irreversible
conversions; for "warn", Git only prints a warning but accepts an
irreversible conversion. The safety triggers to prevent such a conversion done
to the files in the work tree, but there are a few exceptions. Even though...
[core] autocrlf = true
* text=auto
* text=auto *.txt text *.vcproj text eol=crlf *.sh text eol=lf *.jpg -text
$ 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"
manual.pdf -text
weirdchars.txt text
•git add itself does not touch the files in
the work tree, the next checkout would, so the safety triggers;
•git apply to update a text file with a
patch does touch the files in the work tree, but the operation is about text
files and CRLF conversion is about fixing the line ending inconsistencies, so
the safety does not trigger;
•git diff itself does not touch the files
in the work tree, it is often run to inspect the changes you intend to next
git add. To catch potential problems early, safety triggers.
When the attribute ident is set for a path, Git replaces $Id$ in
the blob object with $Id:, followed by the 40-character hexadecimal
blob object name, followed by a dollar sign $ upon checkout. Any byte
sequence that begins with $Id: and ends with $ in the worktree
file is replaced with $Id$ upon check-in.
A filter attribute can be set to a string value that names a filter
driver specified in the configuration.
A filter driver consists of a clean command and a smudge command,
either of which can be left unspecified. Upon checkout, when the smudge
command is specified, the command is fed the blob object from its standard
input, and its standard output is used to update the worktree file. Similarly,
the clean command is used to convert the contents of worktree file upon
checkin. By default these commands process only a single blob and terminate.
If a long running process filter is used in place of clean
and/or smudge filters, then Git can process all blobs with a single
filter command invocation for the entire life of a single Git command, for
example git add --all. If a long running process filter is
configured then it always takes precedence over a configured single blob
filter. See section below for the description of the protocol used to
communicate with a process filter.
One use of the content filtering is to massage the content into a shape that is
more convenient for the platform, filesystem, and the user to use. For this
mode of operation, the key phrase here is "more convenient" and not
"turning something unusable into usable". In other words, the intent
is that if someone unsets the filter driver definition, or does not have the
appropriate filter program, the project should still be usable.
Another use of the content filtering is to store the content that cannot be
directly used in the repository (e.g. a UUID that refers to the true content
stored outside Git, or an encrypted content) and turn it into a usable form
upon checkout (e.g. download the external content, or decrypt the encrypted
content).
These two filters behave differently, and by default, a filter is taken as the
former, massaging the contents into more convenient shape. A missing filter
driver definition in the config, or a filter driver that exits with a non-zero
status, is not an error but makes the filter a no-op passthru.
You can declare that a filter turns a content that by itself is unusable into a
usable content by setting the filter.<driver>.required configuration
variable to true.
For example, in .gitattributes, you would assign the filter attribute for
paths.
Then you would define a "filter.indent.clean" and
"filter.indent.smudge" configuration in your .git/config to specify
a pair of commands to modify the contents of C programs when the source files
are checked in ("clean" is run) and checked out (no change is made
because the command is "cat").
For best results, clean should not alter its output further if it is run
twice ("clean→clean" should be equivalent to
"clean"), and multiple smudge commands should not alter
clean's output ("smudge→smudge→clean" should be
equivalent to "clean"). See the section on merging below.
The "indent" filter is well-behaved in this regard: it will not modify
input that is already correctly indented. In this case, the lack of a smudge
filter means that the clean filter must accept its own output without
modifying it.
If a filter must succeed in order to make the stored contents usable, you
can declare that the filter is required, in the configuration:
Sequence "%f" on the filter command line is replaced with the name of
the file the filter is working on. A filter might use this in keyword
substitution. For example:
Note that "%f" is the name of the path that is being worked on.
Depending on the version that is being filtered, the corresponding file on
disk may not exist, or may have different contents. So, smudge and clean
commands should not try to access the file on disk, but only act as filters on
the content provided to them on standard input.
*.c filter=indent
[filter "indent"] clean = indent smudge = cat
[filter "crypt"] clean = openssl enc ... smudge = openssl enc -d ... required
[filter "p4"] clean = git-p4-filter --clean %f smudge = git-p4-filter --smudge %f
If the filter command (a string value) is defined via
filter.<driver>.process then Git can process all blobs with a
single filter invocation for the entire life of a single Git command. This is
achieved by using a packet format (pkt-line, see
technical/protocol-common.txt) based protocol over standard input and standard
output as follows. All packets, except for the "*CONTENT" packets
and the "0000" flush packet, are considered text and therefore are
terminated by a LF.
Git starts the filter when it encounters the first file that needs to be cleaned
or smudged. After the filter started Git sends a welcome message
("git-filter-client"), a list of supported protocol version numbers,
and a flush packet. Git expects to read a welcome response message
("git-filter-server"), exactly one protocol version number from the
previously sent list, and a flush packet. All further communication will be
based on the selected version. The remaining protocol description below
documents "version=2". Please note that "version=42" in
the example below does not exist and is only there to illustrate how the
protocol would look like with more than one version.
After the version negotiation Git sends a list of all capabilities that it
supports and a flush packet. Git expects to read a list of desired
capabilities, which must be a subset of the supported capabilities list, and a
flush packet as response:
Supported filter capabilities in version 2 are "clean" and
"smudge".
Afterwards Git sends a list of "key=value" pairs terminated with a
flush packet. The list will contain at least the filter command (based on the
supported capabilities) and the pathname of the file to filter relative to the
repository root. Right after the flush packet Git sends the content split in
zero or more pkt-line packets and a flush packet to terminate content. Please
note, that the filter must not send any response before it received the
content and the final flush packet.
The filter is expected to respond with a list of "key=value" pairs
terminated with a flush packet. If the filter does not experience problems
then the list must contain a "success" status. Right after these
packets the filter is expected to send the content in zero or more pkt-line
packets and a flush packet at the end. Finally, a second list of
"key=value" pairs terminated with a flush packet is expected. The
filter can change the status in the second list or keep the status as is with
an empty list. Please note that the empty list must be terminated with a flush
packet regardless.
If the result content is empty then the filter is expected to respond with a
"success" status and a flush packet to signal the empty content.
In case the filter cannot or does not want to process the content, it is
expected to respond with an "error" status.
If the filter experiences an error during processing, then it can send the
status "error" after the content was (partially or completely) sent.
In case the filter cannot or does not want to process the content as well as any
future content for the lifetime of the Git process, then it is expected to
respond with an "abort" status at any point in the protocol.
Git neither stops nor restarts the filter process in case the
"error"/"abort" status is set. However, Git sets its exit
code according to the filter.<driver>.required flag, mimicking
the behavior of the filter.<driver>.clean /
filter.<driver>.smudge mechanism.
If the filter dies during the communication or does not adhere to the protocol
then Git will stop the filter process and restart it with the next file that
needs to be processed. Depending on the filter.<driver>.required
flag Git will interpret that as error.
After the filter has processed a blob it is expected to wait for the next
"key=value" list containing a command. Git will close the command
pipe on exit. The filter is expected to detect EOF and exit gracefully on its
own. Git will wait until the filter process has stopped.
A long running filter demo implementation can be found in
contrib/long-running-filter/example.pl located in the Git core
repository. If you develop your own long running filter process then the
GIT_TRACE_PACKET environment variables can be very helpful for
debugging (see git(1)).
Please note that you cannot use an existing filter.<driver>.clean
or filter.<driver>.smudge command with
filter.<driver>.process because the former two use a different
inter process communication protocol than the latter one.
packet: git> git-filter-client packet: git> version=2 packet: git> version=42 packet: git> 0000 packet: git< git-filter-server packet: git< version=2 packet: git< 0000 packet: git> capability=clean packet: git> capability=smudge packet: git> capability=not-yet-invented packet: git> 0000 packet: git< capability=clean packet: git< capability=smudge packet: git< 0000
packet: git> command=smudge packet: git> pathname=path/testfile.dat packet: git> 0000 packet: git> CONTENT packet: git> 0000
packet: git< status=success packet: git< 0000 packet: git< SMUDGED_CONTENT packet: git< 0000 packet: git< 0000 # empty list, keep "status=success" unchanged!
packet: git< status=success packet: git< 0000 packet: git< 0000 # empty content! packet: git< 0000 # empty list, keep "status=success" unchanged!
packet: git< status=error packet: git< 0000
packet: git< status=success packet: git< 0000 packet: git< HALF_WRITTEN_ERRONEOUS_CONTENT packet: git< 0000 packet: git< status=error packet: git< 0000
packet: git< status=abort packet: git< 0000
In the check-in codepath, the worktree file is first converted with
filter driver (if specified and corresponding driver defined), then the
result is processed with ident (if specified), and then finally with
text (again, if specified and applicable).
In the check-out codepath, the blob content is first converted with text,
and then ident and fed to filter.
If you have added attributes to a file that cause the canonical repository
format for that file to change, such as adding a clean/smudge filter or
text/eol/ident attributes, merging anything where the attribute is not in
place would normally cause merge conflicts.
To prevent these unnecessary merge conflicts, Git can be told to run a virtual
check-out and check-in of all three stages of a file when resolving a
three-way merge by setting the merge.renormalize configuration
variable. This prevents changes caused by check-in conversion from causing
spurious merge conflicts when a converted file is merged with an unconverted
file.
As long as a "smudge→clean" results in the same output as a
"clean" even on files that are already smudged, this strategy will
automatically resolve all filter-related conflicts. Filters that do not act in
this way may cause additional merge conflicts that must be resolved
manually.
Generating diff text¶
diff
The attribute diff affects how Git generates diffs for particular files.
It can tell Git whether to generate a textual patch for the path or to treat
the path as a binary file. It can also affect what line is shown on the hunk
header @@ -k,l +n,m @@ line, tell Git to use an external command to
generate the diff, or ask Git to convert binary files to a text format before
generating the diff.
Set
A path to which the diff attribute is set is
treated as text, even when they contain byte values that normally never appear
in text files, such as NUL.
Unset
A path to which the diff attribute is unset will
generate Binary files differ (or a binary patch, if binary patches are
enabled).
Unspecified
A path to which the diff attribute is unspecified
first gets its contents inspected, and if it looks like text and is smaller
than core.bigFileThreshold, it is treated as text. Otherwise it would generate
Binary files differ.
String
Diff is shown using the specified diff driver. Each
driver may specify one or more options, as described in the following section.
The options for the diff driver "foo" are defined by the
configuration variables in the "diff.foo" section of the Git config
file.
The definition of a diff driver is done in gitconfig, not
gitattributes file, so strictly speaking this manual page is a wrong
place to talk about it. However...
To define an external diff driver jcdiff, add a section to your
$GIT_DIR/config file (or $HOME/.gitconfig file) like this:
When Git needs to show you a diff for the path with diff attribute set to
jcdiff, it calls the command you specified with the above
configuration, i.e. j-c-diff, with 7 parameters, just like
GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF program is called. See git(1) for
details.
[diff "jcdiff"] command = j-c-diff
Each group of changes (called a "hunk") in the textual diff output is
prefixed with a line of the form:
This is called a hunk header. The "TEXT" portion is by default
a line that begins with an alphabet, an underscore or a dollar sign; this
matches what GNU diff -p output uses. This default selection however is
not suited for some contents, and you can use a customized pattern to make a
selection.
First, in .gitattributes, you would assign the diff attribute for paths.
Then, you would define a "diff.tex.xfuncname" configuration to specify
a regular expression that matches a line that you would want to appear as the
hunk header "TEXT". Add a section to your $GIT_DIR/config
file (or $HOME/.gitconfig file) like this:
Note. A single level of backslashes are eaten by the configuration file parser,
so you would need to double the backslashes; the pattern above picks a line
that begins with a backslash, and zero or more occurrences of sub
followed by section followed by open brace, to the end of line.
There are a few built-in patterns to make this easier, and tex is one of
them, so you do not have to write the above in your configuration file (you
still need to enable this with the attribute mechanism, via
.gitattributes). The following built in patterns are available:
@@ -k,l +n,m @@ TEXT
*.tex diff=tex
[diff "tex"] xfuncname = "^(\\\\(sub)*section\\{.*)$"
•ada suitable for source code in the Ada
language.
•bibtex suitable for files with BibTeX
coded references.
•cpp suitable for source code in the C and
C++ languages.
•csharp suitable for source code in the C#
language.
•css suitable for cascading style
sheets.
•fortran suitable for source code in the
Fortran language.
•fountain suitable for Fountain
documents.
•html suitable for HTML/XHTML
documents.
•java suitable for source code in the Java
language.
•matlab suitable for source code in the
MATLAB language.
•objc suitable for source code in the
Objective-C language.
•pascal suitable for source code in the
Pascal/Delphi language.
•perl suitable for source code in the Perl
language.
•php suitable for source code in the PHP
language.
•python suitable for source code in the
Python language.
•ruby suitable for source code in the Ruby
language.
•tex suitable for source code for LaTeX
documents.
You can customize the rules that git diff --word-diff uses to split words
in a line, by specifying an appropriate regular expression in the
"diff.*.wordRegex" configuration variable. For example, in TeX a
backslash followed by a sequence of letters forms a command, but several such
commands can be run together without intervening whitespace. To separate them,
use a regular expression in your $GIT_DIR/config file (or
$HOME/.gitconfig file) like this:
A built-in pattern is provided for all languages listed in the previous
section.
[diff "tex"] wordRegex = "\\\\[a-zA-Z]+|[{}]|\\\\.|[^\\{}[:space:]]+"
Sometimes it is desirable to see the diff of a text-converted version of some
binary files. For example, a word processor document can be converted to an
ASCII text representation, and the diff of the text shown. Even though this
conversion loses some information, the resulting diff is useful for human
viewing (but cannot be applied directly).
The textconv config option is used to define a program for performing
such a conversion. The program should take a single argument, the name of a
file to convert, and produce the resulting text on stdout.
For example, to show the diff of the exif information of a file instead of the
binary information (assuming you have the exif tool installed), add the
following section to your $GIT_DIR/config file (or
$HOME/.gitconfig file):
Note
The text conversion is generally a one-way conversion; in this example, we lose
the actual image contents and focus just on the text data. This means that
diffs generated by textconv are not suitable for applying. For this
reason, only git diff and the git log family of commands (i.e.,
log, whatchanged, show) will perform text conversion. git format-patch
will never generate this output. If you want to send somebody a text-converted
diff of a binary file (e.g., because it quickly conveys the changes you have
made), you should generate it separately and send it as a comment in
addition to the usual binary diff that you might send.
Because text conversion can be slow, especially when doing a large number of
them with git log -p, Git provides a mechanism to cache the output and
use it in future diffs. To enable caching, set the "cachetextconv"
variable in your diff driver’s config. For example:
This will cache the result of running "exif" on each blob
indefinitely. If you change the textconv config variable for a diff driver,
Git will automatically invalidate the cache entries and re-run the textconv
filter. If you want to invalidate the cache manually (e.g., because your
version of "exif" was updated and now produces better output), you
can remove the cache manually with git update-ref -d
refs/notes/textconv/jpg (where "jpg" is the name of the diff
driver, as in the example above).
[diff "jpg"] textconv = exif
[diff "jpg"] textconv = exif cachetextconv = true
If you want to show differences between binary or specially-formatted blobs in
your repository, you can choose to use either an external diff command, or to
use textconv to convert them to a diff-able text format. Which method you
choose depends on your exact situation.
The advantage of using an external diff command is flexibility. You are not
bound to find line-oriented changes, nor is it necessary for the output to
resemble unified diff. You are free to locate and report changes in the most
appropriate way for your data format.
A textconv, by comparison, is much more limiting. You provide a transformation
of the data into a line-oriented text format, and Git uses its regular diff
tools to generate the output. There are several advantages to choosing this
method:
1.Ease of use. It is often much simpler to write a
binary to text transformation than it is to perform your own diff. In many
cases, existing programs can be used as textconv filters (e.g., exif,
odt2txt).
2.Git diff features. By performing only the
transformation step yourself, you can still utilize many of Git’s diff
features, including colorization, word-diff, and combined diffs for
merges.
3.Caching. Textconv caching can speed up repeated diffs,
such as those you might trigger by running git log -p.
Git usually guesses correctly whether a blob contains text or binary data by
examining the beginning of the contents. However, sometimes you may want to
override its decision, either because a blob contains binary data later in the
file, or because the content, while technically composed of text characters,
is opaque to a human reader. For example, many postscript files contain only
ASCII characters, but produce noisy and meaningless diffs.
The simplest way to mark a file as binary is to unset the diff attribute in the
.gitattributes file:
This will cause Git to generate Binary files differ (or a binary patch,
if binary patches are enabled) instead of a regular diff.
However, one may also want to specify other diff driver attributes. For example,
you might want to use textconv to convert postscript files to an ASCII
representation for human viewing, but otherwise treat them as binary files.
You cannot specify both -diff and diff=ps attributes. The
solution is to use the diff.*.binary config option:
*.ps -diff
[diff "ps"] textconv = ps2ascii binary = true
Performing a three-way merge¶
merge
The attribute merge affects how three versions of a file are merged when
a file-level merge is necessary during git merge, and other commands
such as git revert and git cherry-pick.
Set
Built-in 3-way merge driver is used to merge the contents
in a way similar to merge command of RCS suite. This is suitable
for ordinary text files.
Unset
Take the version from the current branch as the tentative
merge result, and declare that the merge has conflicts. This is suitable for
binary files that do not have a well-defined merge semantics.
Unspecified
By default, this uses the same built-in 3-way merge
driver as is the case when the merge attribute is set. However, the
merge.default configuration variable can name different merge driver to
be used with paths for which the merge attribute is unspecified.
String
3-way merge is performed using the specified custom merge
driver. The built-in 3-way merge driver can be explicitly specified by asking
for "text" driver; the built-in "take the current branch"
driver can be requested with "binary".
There are a few built-in low-level merge drivers defined that can be asked for
via the merge attribute.
text
Usual 3-way file level merge for text files. Conflicted
regions are marked with conflict markers <<<<<<<,
======= and >>>>>>>. The version from your
branch appears before the ======= marker, and the version from the
merged branch appears after the ======= marker.
binary
Keep the version from your branch in the work tree, but
leave the path in the conflicted state for the user to sort out.
union
Run 3-way file level merge for text files, but take lines
from both versions, instead of leaving conflict markers. This tends to leave
the added lines in the resulting file in random order and the user should
verify the result. Do not use this if you do not understand the
implications.
The definition of a merge driver is done in the .git/config file, not in
the gitattributes file, so strictly speaking this manual page is a
wrong place to talk about it. However...
To define a custom merge driver filfre, add a section to your
$GIT_DIR/config file (or $HOME/.gitconfig file) like this:
The merge.*.name variable gives the driver a human-readable name.
The ‘merge.*.driver` variable’s value is used to construct a
command to run to merge ancestor’s version ( %O), current
version ( %A) and the other branches’ version (%B). These
three tokens are replaced with the names of temporary files that hold the
contents of these versions when the command line is built. Additionally, %L
will be replaced with the conflict marker size (see below).
The merge driver is expected to leave the result of the merge in the file named
with %A by overwriting it, and exit with zero status if it managed to
merge them cleanly, or non-zero if there were conflicts.
The merge.*.recursive variable specifies what other merge driver to use
when the merge driver is called for an internal merge between common
ancestors, when there are more than one. When left unspecified, the driver
itself is used for both internal merge and the final merge.
The merge driver can learn the pathname in which the merged result will be
stored via placeholder %P.
[merge "filfre"] name = feel-free merge driver driver = filfre %O %A %B %L %P recursive = binary
This attribute controls the length of conflict markers left in the work tree
file during a conflicted merge. Only setting to the value to a positive
integer has any meaningful effect.
For example, this line in .gitattributes can be used to tell the merge
machinery to leave much longer (instead of the usual 7-character-long)
conflict markers when merging the file Documentation/git-merge.txt
results in a conflict.
Documentation/git-merge.txt conflict-marker-size=32
Checking whitespace errors¶
whitespace
The core.whitespace configuration variable allows you to define what
diff and apply should consider whitespace errors for all paths
in the project (See git-config(1)). This attribute gives you finer
control per path.
Set
Notice all types of potential whitespace errors known to
Git. The tab width is taken from the value of the core.whitespace
configuration variable.
Unset
Do not notice anything as error.
Unspecified
Use the value of the core.whitespace configuration
variable to decide what to notice as error.
String
Specify a comma separate list of common whitespace
problems to notice in the same format as the core.whitespace
configuration variable.
Creating an archive¶
export-ignore
Files and directories with the attribute export-ignore won’t be
added to archive files.
If the attribute export-subst is set for a file then Git will expand
several placeholders when adding this file to an archive. The expansion
depends on the availability of a commit ID, i.e., if git-archive(1) has
been given a tree instead of a commit or a tag then no replacement will be
done. The placeholders are the same as those for the option
--pretty=format: of git-log(1), except that they need to be
wrapped like this: $Format:PLACEHOLDERS$ in the file. E.g. the string
$Format:%H$ will be replaced by the commit hash.
Packing objects¶
delta
Delta compression will not be attempted for blobs for paths with the attribute
delta set to false.
Viewing files in GUI tools¶
encoding
The value of this attribute specifies the character encoding that should be used
by GUI tools (e.g. gitk(1) and git-gui(1)) to display the
contents of the relevant file. Note that due to performance considerations
gitk(1) does not use this attribute unless you manually enable per-file
encodings in its options.
If this attribute is not set or has an invalid value, the value of the
gui.encoding configuration variable is used instead (See
git-config(1)).
USING MACRO ATTRIBUTES¶
You do not want any end-of-line conversions applied to, nor textual diffs produced for, any binary file you track. You would need to specify e.g.*.jpg -text -diff
*.jpg binary
DEFINING MACRO ATTRIBUTES¶
Custom macro attributes can be defined only in top-level gitattributes files ( $GIT_DIR/info/attributes, the .gitattributes file at the top level of the working tree, or the global or system-wide gitattributes files), not in .gitattributes files in working tree subdirectories. The built-in macro attribute "binary" is equivalent to:[attr]binary -diff -merge -text
EXAMPLE¶
If you have these three gitattributes file:(in $GIT_DIR/info/attributes) a* foo !bar -baz (in .gitattributes) abc foo bar baz (in t/.gitattributes) ab* merge=filfre abc -foo -bar *.c frotz
1.By examining t/.gitattributes (which is in the
same directory as the path in question), Git finds that the first line
matches. merge attribute is set. It also finds that the second line
matches, and attributes foo and bar are unset.
2.Then it examines .gitattributes (which is in
the parent directory), and finds that the first line matches, but
t/.gitattributes file already decided how merge, foo and
bar attributes should be given to this path, so it leaves foo
and bar unset. Attribute baz is set.
3.Finally it examines $GIT_DIR/info/attributes.
This file is used to override the in-tree settings. The first line is a match,
and foo is set, bar is reverted to unspecified state, and
baz is unset.
As the result, the attributes assignment to t/abc becomes:
foo set to true bar unspecified baz set to false merge set to string value "filfre" frotz unspecified
SEE ALSO¶
git-check-attr(1).GIT¶
Part of the git(1) suite05/15/2017 | Git 2.11.0 |