Why do I get differences I can't get rid of when switching branches in git, and how to fix it?
git
Solution
You didn't mention what OS you use, what OS your remote repo uses (if any) or whether your team works cross-platform with other OS's. That kind of info may help diagnose the problem.
I've seen problems like these crop up due to:
line-endings (Windows vs Mac vs Linux)
You fix this with core.*crlf settings and .gitattributes files. The github help page for this and the gitattributes manpage are the great resources for this.
Trying to fix line-endings with git filter-branch, but having no luck https://help.github.com/articles/dealing-with-line-endings https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/gitattributes.html
Don't miss the part at the end of the github help that talks about how you have to normalize your repo after getting this setup:
After you've set the core.autocrlf option and committed a .gitattributes file, you may find that git wants to commit files that you've not modified. This is because git wants to normalize the line endings for you. The best way to do this is ...
case-insensitive filesystems when files/dirs with mismatched case already exist
In particular, that `Src` dir looks particularly suspicious to me. This usually happens because someone renamed a file in the repo to the same name but used a different case for one or more letters. Then someone updates their local repo and work dir, git is told by the (case-insenstive filesystem) filesystem that the file/dir already exists, but other git code will treat the file/dir as new.
Try doing a fresh clone into an new or empty directory. See if the filename/dirname letter cases are different between the paths of the problematic files in your fresh clone and your original clone (look hard at the `Src` dir - it may be `src` in the repo. If available, I'd do the fresh clone on a Unix/Linux system.
Unicode characters in filenames
This doesn't seem to be the case for your problem, but I thought it worth mentioning for completeness. This is a variant of the case-insensitivity issue, but is also impacted by how a filesystem handles Unicode characters in filenames.
See Git clean not removing a file for a description of a problem someone else was having with Unicode in filenames.
Problem
Here is some pertinent output from the command line (with poshgit showing the status): ``` [Branch1]> git checkout Branch2 Switched to branch 'Branch2' [Branch2 +0 ~3 -0]> [Branch2 +0 ~3 -0]> git diff --ignore-space-at-eol [Branch2 +0 ~3 -0]> git checkout . [Branch2 +0 ~3 -0]> ``` I tried the solutions suggested in this question ``` [Branch2 +0 ~3 -0]> git reset --hard HEAD is now at c8be749 some comment [Branch2 +0 ~3 -0]> git reset HEAD Unstaged another commit: M Src/somefile M Src/someotherfile.cs M Src/athirdfile.cs [Branch2 +0 ~3 -0]> ``` how does this happen and how can I fix it apart from committing the changes as I seem unable to undo the differences. Even stashing does nothing. Some suggestions for how we got into this mess and how we can get out of it would be much appreciated. I have been able to reproduce this reliably now so am in a position to get a more definitive answer. If I freshly clone me repo, then switch to a branch and then back to master I get some files which say they have changes. I have tried playing with the settings of core.autocrlf but that just seems to change the number of files that are affected and doesn't solve the problem completely. What can I do to try and fix this increasingly annoying issue?