How to make git understand Mac (CR) line endings

Question

For some reasons one of my files contains old style Mac line endings (after editing on OSX). These are \"CR\" (carriage return) characters and show up as ^M in git dif

Answer 1

Since the accepted answer, a new way to do this has been introduced.

You can teach git diff and git log to run the file through a special command before creating the diff. This is a one-way process, which is just used for generating diffs, and doesn't affect how the files are stored on disk or in your repository.

Create a new diff driver called "cr", which runs the file through tr before calculating the diff. In your .git/config:

[diff "cr"]
    textconv = tr '\\r' '\\n' <

Alternatively:

git config diff.cr.textconv "tr '\r' '\n' <"

Then tell git to use it using your .gitattributes (e.g. for all .csv files):

*.csv diff=cr

Note that this only affects diffs. It won't help you with merging!