Perforce: Keeping Perforce from altering text-file format

Question

Is there a way to tell Perforce to leave text files alone without setting the file-type as binary? Or barring that, is there a way to tell the Perforce client to diff binaries?

Answer 1

The Perforce client can handle line ending properly when syncing to different platforms provided you have LineEnd option set properly on your client. Perhaps you have yours set wrong? Open up your client specs and set the LineEnd option according to your needs.

Check out this KB article on their website for more info. Here's an excerpt:

On the server side, Perforce processes all text files using Unix-style LF line-endings. Although Perforce stores server archive files on disk in the operating system's native line termination convention (CR/LF on Windows, LF on Unix), all line-endings are normalized to Unix-style LF line-endings for internal Perforce Server operations such as p4 sync, p4 submit and p4 diff.

On the client workspace side, Perforce handling of line-endings is determined by a global option for each clientspec. When you sync text files to a client workspace with p4 sync, or submit them back to a Perforce Server with p4 submit, their line-endings are converted as specified in the clientspec LineEnd section.