Git replacing LF with CRLF

Git has three modes of how it treats line endings:

# This command will print "true" or "false" or "input"
git config core.autocrlf

You can set the mode to use by adding an additional parameter of true or false to the above command line.

If core.autocrlf is set to true, that means that any time you add a file to the Git repository that Git thinks is a text file, it will turn all CRLF line endings to just LF before it stores it in the commit. Whenever you git checkout something, all text files automatically will have their LF line endings converted to CRLF endings. This allows development of a project across platforms that use different line-ending styles without commits being very noisy, because each editor changes the line ending style as the line ending style is always consistently LF.

The side effect of this convenient conversion, and this is what the warning you're seeing is about, is that if a text file you authored originally had LF endings instead of CRLF, it will be stored with LF as usual, but when checked out later it will have CRLF endings. For normal text files this is usually just fine. The warning is a "for your information" in this case, but in case Git incorrectly assesses a binary file to be a text file, it is an important warning, because Git would then be corrupting your binary file.

If core.autocrlf is set to false, no line-ending conversion is ever performed, so text files are checked in as-is. This usually works ok, as long as all your developers are either on Linux or all on Windows. But in my experience I still tend to get text files with mixed line endings that end up causing problems.

My personal preference is to leave the setting turned ON, as a Windows developer.

See git-config for updated information that includes the "input" value.

I had this problem too.

SVN doesn't do any line ending conversion, so files are committed with CRLF line endings intact. If you then use git-svn to put the project into git then the CRLF endings persist across into the git repository, which is not the state git expects to find itself in - the default being to only have unix/linux (LF) line endings checked in.

When you then check out the files on windows, the autocrlf conversion leaves the files intact (as they already have the correct endings for the current platform), however the process that decides whether there is a difference with the checked in files performs the reverse conversion before comparing, resulting in comparing what it thinks is an LF in the checked out file with an unexpected CRLF in the repository.

As far as I can see your choices are:

1. Re-import your code into a new git repository without using git-svn, this will mean line endings are converted in the intial git commit --all
2. Set autocrlf to false, and ignore the fact that the line endings are not in git's preferred style
3. Check out your files with autocrlf off, fix all the line endings, check everything back in, and turn it back on again.
4. Rewrite your repository's history so that the original commit no longer contains the CRLF that git wasn't expecting. (The usual caveats about history rewriting apply)

Footnote: if you choose option #2 then my experience is that some of the ancillary tools (rebase, patch etc) do not cope with CRLF files and you will end up sooner or later with files with a mix of CRLF and LF (inconsistent line endings). I know of no way of getting the best of both.

Most of the tools in Windows also accepts a simple LF in text files. For example, you can control the behaviour for Visual Studio in a file named '.editorconfig' with following example content (part):

 indent_style = space
 indent_size = 2
 end_of_line = lf    <<====
 charset = utf-8

Only the original Windows Notepad does not work with LF, but there are some more proper simple editor tools available!

Hence you should use LF in text files in Windows too. This is my message, and it is strongly recommended! There isn’t any reason to use CRLF in windows!

(The same discussion is using \ in include paths in C/++. It is bovine fecal matter. Use #include <pathTo/myheader.h> with slash!, It is the C/++ standard and all Microsoft compilers support it).

Hence the proper setting for Git is:

git config core.autocrlf false

My message: Forget such old thinking programs as dos2unix and unix2dos. Clarify in your team that LF is proper to use under Windows.

I don't know much about Git on Windows, but...

It appears to me that Git is converting the return format to match that of the running platform (Windows). CRLF is the default return format on Windows, while LF is the default return format for most other OSes.

Chances are, the return format will be adjusted properly when the code is moved to another system. I also reckon Git is smart enough to keep binary files intact rather than trying to convert LFs to CRLFs in, say, JPEG files.

In summary, you probably don't need to fret too much over this conversion. However, if you go to archive your project as a tarball, fellow coders would probably appreciate having LF line terminators rather than CRLF. Depending on how much you care (and depending on you not using Notepad), you might want to set Git to use LF returns if you can :)

Appendix: CR is ASCII code 13, LF is ASCII code 10. Thus, CRLF is two bytes, while LF is one.

Make sure that you have installed the latest version of Git

I did as in a previous answer, git config core.autocrlf false, when using Git (version 2.7.1), but it did not work.

Then it works now when upgrading git (from 2.7.1 to 2.20.1).

CRLF could cause some problem while using your "code" in two different OSes (Linux and Windows).

My Python script was written in a Linux Docker container and then pushed using Windows' Git Bash. It gave me the warning that LF will be replaced by CRLF. I didn't give it much thought, but then when I started the script later, it said:

/usr/bin/env: 'python\r': No such file or directory

Now that is an \r for ramification for you. Windows uses "CR" - carriage return - on top of '\n' as new line character - \n\r. That's something you might have to consider.

Many text editors allow you to change to LF. See the Atom instructions below. It is simple and explicit.

Click CRLF on the bottom right:

Select LF in dropdown on top:

Other answers are fantastic for the general concept. I ran into a problem where after updating the warning still happened on existing repositories which had commits in previous setting.

Adding with --renormalize helped, e.g.,

git add --renormalize .

From the documentation:

" Apply the "clean" process freshly to all tracked files to forcibly add them again to the index. This is useful after changing core.autocrlf configuration or the text attribute in order to correct files added with wrong CRLF/LF line endings. This option implies -u."

I just had the same error. It happened after installing NVM NVM on Windows 10.

Setting the autoclrf in all levels did not worked.

In CMD I used: “git ls-files --eol”

i/lf    w/crlf  attr/             src/components/quotes/ExQuoteForm.js
i/lf    w/lf    attr/             src/components/quotes/HighlightedQuote.js

Conclusion:

Files I made have the different ending.

To change the files and reset, do

git config core.autocrlf false
git rm --cached -r .
git reset --hard

Although:

In some projects I needed to delete the repository and start it fresh.

CR and LF are a special set of characters that helps format our code.

CR (/r) puts the cursor at the beginning of a line but doesn't create a new line. This is how macOS works.

LF (/n) creates a new line, but it doesn't put the cursor at the beginning of that line. The cursor stays back at the end of the last line. This is how Unix and Linux work.

CRLF (/r/f) creates a new line as well as puts the cursor at the beginning of the new line. This is how we see it in Windows OS.

To summarize:

1. LF (LINE FEED)

• stands for Line Feed
• denoted with /n
• creates a new line in the code
• The ASCII code is 10.
• Used by Unix and other OSes based around it.

2. CR (CARRIAGE RETURN)

• stands for CARRIAGE RETURN
• denoted with /r
• puts the cursor on the beginning of a line.
• The ASCII code is 13.
• Used by macOS and its predecessors.

3. CRLF (CARRIAGE RETURN AND LINE FEED)

• stands for CARRIAGE RETURN and LINE FEED
• denoted with /n/r
• creates a new line and puts the cursor at the beginning of that new line.
• The ASCII code is 10 for LF and 13 for CR.
• Primarily used on Windows OS.

Git uses LF by default. So when we use Git on Windows, it throws a warning like- "CRLF will be replaced by LF" and automatically converts all CRLF into LF, so that code becomes compatible.

NB: Don't worry...see this less as a warning and more as a notification message.

I had the same issue, and doing git add . && git reset reverted all line endings correctly.