Git: How to revert 2 files that are stubbornly stuck at “Changed but not committed”?

Question

I have a repo that has two files that supposedly I changed locally.

So I\'m stuck with this:

$ git status
# On branch master
# Changed but not update         


        

Answer 1

I think it would be helpful to provide a hint on how to reproduce the issue, in order to better understand the problem:

$ git init
$ echo "*.txt -text" > .gitattributes
$ echo -e "hello\r\nworld" > 1.txt
$ git add 1.txt 
$ git commit -m "committed as binary"
$ echo "*.txt text" > .gitattributes
$ echo "change.." >> 1.txt

# Ok let's revert now

$ git checkout -- 1.txt
$ git status
 modified:   1.txt

# Oooops, it didn't revert!!


# hm let's diff:

$ git diff
 warning: CRLF will be replaced by LF in 1.txt.
 The file will have its original line endings in your working 
 directory.
 diff --git a/1.txt b/1.txt
 index c78c505..94954ab 100644
 --- a/1.txt
 +++ b/1.txt
 @@ -1,2 +1,2 @@
 -hello
 +hello
  world

# No actual changes. Ahh, let's change the line endings...

$ file 1.txt 
 1.txt: ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators
$ dos2unix 1.txt
 dos2unix: converting file 1.txt to Unix format ...
$ git diff
 git diff 1.txt
 diff --git a/1.txt b/1.txt
 index c78c505..94954ab 100644
 --- a/1.txt
 +++ b/1.txt
 @@ -1,2 +1,2 @@
 -hello
 +hello
  world

# No, it didn't work, file is still considered modified.

# Let's try to revert for once more:
$ git checkout -- 1.txt
$ git status
 modified:   1.txt

# Nothing. Let's use a magic command that prints wrongly committed files.

$ git grep -I --files-with-matches --perl-regexp '\r' HEAD

HEAD:1.txt

2nd way to reproduce: In the above script replace this line:
echo "*.txt -text" > .gitattributes
with
git config core.autocrlf=false
and keep the rest of the lines as is

---

What all the above say? A text file can (under some circumstances) be committed with CRLF, (e.g. -text in .gitattributes / or core.autocrlf=false).

When we later want to treat the same file as text (-text -> text) it will need to be committed again.
Of course you can temporarily revert it (as correctly answered by Abu Assar). In our case:

echo "*.txt -text" > .gitattributes
git checkout -- 1.txt
echo "*.txt text" > .gitattributes

The answer is: do you really want to do that, because it's gonna cause the same problem everytime you change the file.

---

For the record:

To check which files can cause this problem in your repo execute the following command (git should be compiled with --with-libpcre):

git grep -I --files-with-matches --perl-regexp '\r' HEAD

By committing the file(s) (supposing that you want to treat them as text), it is the same thing as doing what is proposed in this link http://help.github.com/line-endings/ for fixing such problems. But, instead of you removing .git/index and performing reset, you can just change the file(s), then perform git checkout -- xyz zyf and then commit.