How to renormalize line endings in my working directory

Question

I have files in a git repo with LF endings. Somehow some of the files in my working tree got converted to CRLF. Is there a way to convert the line endings in my working tree back to LF?

Note that I have a few files in the directory .gitignored so I don't want to simply delete everything and check it out again (though if there's a way to only delete tracked files and check them out again that would work I guess).

Answer 1

The main problem with using git checkout HEAD -- . or git checkout HEAD -- path is that Git tries to optimize away the checkout, if Git thinks there's no need to do the checkout.¹ As you noted in your own answer, git reset has the same optimization.

There are several ways to defeat the optimization. The one you chose—using git ls-files -z | xargs -0 rm -f—works fine. Another is to touch each file that you want Git to overwrite: this invalidates the cache data in Git's index. Since touch doesn't actually modify the file, this can be simpler: touch * is usually fairly painless. It doesn't handle subdirectories, though. You could run git ls-files -z | xargs -0 touch, which is almost the same as in your answer.

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¹Obviously, if CRLF-handling for index-to-work-tree copying has changed since the previous index-to-work-tree copy step, this optimization is incorrect: Git does need to do the checkout. But Git's cache doesn't realize that. Possibly there should be a plumbing command, git whack-cache or git frotz-index or something, that just invalidates each cache entry, so as to force a real checkout.