Git refuses to reset/discard files

Question

I have a project with certain js files which I cannot update. I run OSX locally and my remote/staging server is Linux (CentOS).

Right after cloning my project locall

Answer 1

This issue repeatedly popped up with the Roll20 character sheets repository on an Ubuntu machine and I could solve it by

#!/bin/sh

# Use in root dir of git repository
# Fixes some newline-related weirdness
git rm --cached -r .
git reset --hard

But, this stopped resolving the issue completely today and by looking around Stack Overflow I found the culprit to be their .gitattributes file:

# Auto detect text files and perform LF normalization
* text=auto

After git pull origin master, git status returned:

On branch master
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
Changes not staged for commit:
  (use "git add ..." to update what will be committed)
  (use "git checkout -- ..." to discard changes in working directory)

    modified:   Star Wars Revised RPG/SWRRPG-updated.html

no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

The solution was to remove the * text=auto line from the .gitattributes:

$ git status
On branch master
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
Changes not staged for commit:
  (use "git add ..." to update what will be committed)
  (use "git checkout -- ..." to discard changes in working directory)

    modified:   .gitattributes

no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

The changes on .gitattributes can be discarded and Git will still be satisfied.

Edit +1d: Retried the .gitattributes "trick" today, but did not git status before discarding the .gitattributes changes. For no reason obvious to me (maybe caching of git status?), a git status afterwards returned this again:

On branch master
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
Changes not staged for commit:
  (use "git add ..." to update what will be committed)
  (use "git checkout -- ..." to discard changes in working directory)

    modified:   Star Wars Revised RPG/SWRRPG-updated.html

no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

Doing it again, but with git status inbetween worked.