Resolving Conflicts - Git Recipes - page 322

bindir/ binary
*.xyz text

In general, the syntax of the .gitattributes file allows you to define a list of
attributes for every pattern:

pattern attribute-1 attribute-2 attribute-3 ...

Pattern defines which files should be affected by a rule. Here are four pattern ex-
amples:

* # all files

*.txt # all files ending with .txt

somedir/ # all files under somedir/ directory

readme.txt # one file readme.txt

For every pattern you can apply the arbitrary number of attributes, as in:

*.txt text -merge eol=crlf

This line defines a rule that will be used for all the files matching the *.txt pat-
tern. The rule consists of three entries:

text
-merge
eol=crlf

The first entry, which consists of a single word text , sets the text attribute for all
matching files. As a consequence all the *.txt files will be regarded as text files, and
therefore git will perform an end-of-line normalization on them.
The second entry, which consists of one word merge preceded with a dash, unsets
the merge attribute. It means that all *.txt files are to be merged as binary files.
The last rule sets the end-of-line characters that should be used during checkout.
The list of all available attributes is summarized in Table 9-2 .

Table 9-2 . The list of available attributes