When illustrating how to normalize the line endings, the
documentation in gitattributes tells the user to `rm .git/index`.
This is incorrect for two reasons:
- Users shouldn't be instructed to mess around with the internal
implementation of Git using raw file system tools like `rm`.
- Within a submodule or an additional working tree `.git` is just a
file containing a `gitdir: ` pointer into the real `.git`
directory. Therefore `rm .git/index` does not work.
The purpose or `rm .git/index` instruction is to remove all entries
from the index without touching the working tree. The way to do this
with Git is to use `read-tree --empty`.
Signed-off-by: Andreas Heiduk
Helped-by: Junio C Hamano
Helped-by: Torsten Bögershausen
---
Documentation/gitattributes.txt | 2 +-
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
diff --git a/Documentation/gitattributes.txt b/Documentation/gitattributes.txt
index 473648386..2a2d7e2a4 100644
--- a/Documentation/gitattributes.txt
+++ b/Documentation/gitattributes.txt
@@ -229,7 +229,7 @@ From a clean working directory:
-
$ echo "* text=auto" >.gitattributes
-$ rm .git/index # Remove the index to re-scan the working directory
+$ git read-tree --empty # Clean index, force re-scan of working directory
$ git add .
$ git status# Show files that will be normalized
$ git commit -m "Introduce end-of-line normalization"
--
2.13.0
