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

Try to revert local changes:

git checkout -- dir1/foo.aspx
git checkout -- dir2/foo.aspx

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

I spent hours trying to solve a similar issue - a remote branch that I had checked out, which stubbornly showed four files as 'Changed but not updated', even when deleting all files and running git checkout -f again (or other variations from this post)!

These four files were necessary, but certainly hadn't been modified by me. My final solution - persuade Git that they had not been changed. The following works for all checked out files, showing 'modified' status - make sure you have already committed/stashed any that have really been modified!:

git ls-files -m | xargs -i git update-index --assume-unchanged "{}"

On Mac OSX, however xargs operates a little bit different (thx Daniel for the comment):

git ls-files -m | xargs -I {} git update-index --assume-unchanged {}

I've added this as a placeholder for myself for next time, but I hope it helps someone else too.

-Al

Answer 4

this is how I fixed the same problem in my case: open .gitattributes change:

* text=auto

to:

#* text=auto

save and close , then revert or reset, thanks to @Simon East for the hint

Answer 5

Another possibility is that the difference (that's preventing your from reverting these files with a checkout command) is one of file mode. This is what happened to me. On my version of git you can discover this by using

git diff dir1/foo.aspx

And it will show you file mode changes. It still won't let you revert them, though. For that use either

git config core.filemode false

or change your git .config in your text editor by adding

[core]

filemode = false

After you do this, you can use

git reset HEAD dir1/foo.aspx

and the file should disappear.

(I got all of this from the answer to How do I make git ignore mode changes (chmod)?)

Answer 6

I had some phantom changed files that were showing as modified, but were actually identical.

Running this command sometimes works:
(Turns off git's "smart" but often unhelpful line-ending conversions)

git config --local core.autocrlf false

But in another case I found it was due to a .gitattributes file in the root which had some line-ending settings present, which was trying to apply autocrlf for certain files even when it was turned off. That wasn't actually helpful, so I deleted .gitattributes, committed, and the file no longer showed as modified.