Fixing Git checkout line endings

Recently when I was trying to run brew update on my Mac I was hitting errors that claimed I had uncommitted changes to my local brew and yet I hadn’t made any changes. It didn’t matter what I did, the changes would not revert and the errors would not go away.

brew doctor revealed there were uncommitted changes so I followed the fix instructions to no avail.

The problem turned out to be caused by line-endings that were being modified due to my local ~/.gitattributes.

Making the global fix commonly recommended on stackoverflow.com didn’t help, due to my local settings over-riding the settings.

This didn’t work:

git config --global core.autocrlf false

Reverting all local changes to brew after adding any necessary changes to ~/.gitattributes for the line-endings / binary:

cd /usr/local/Library
git rm --cached -r .
git reset --hard origin/master
git status

git rm --cached -r . will remove all local files preparing your local directory to accept the correct attributes.

git reset --hard origin/master pulls all changes back in

git status should now say:

On branch master
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
nothing to commit, working directory clean