git status shows all files as modified

[charlescho]

I have some repos created in windows. When I run git status, it shows all files in the branch as up to date and nothing to commit except for a couple of untracked files. When I run git status, in bash on Ubuntu on Windows, it shows what seems to be all of my files as modified and not staged for commit.

[benhillis]

Could you check if your git for windows version and git version inside bash are similar? It's possible that there is an incompatibility between the way the versions keep track of changes.

[charlescho]

@benhillis you might be right about that. In windows I have git version 2.7.2 installed, and in ubuntu on windows, I have version 2.8.1 installed. I guess this is not a big deal since I knew all my repos were up to date and I could do a git reset in bash on ubuntu on windows.

[benhillis]

I'm speculating :)

I'll try this as well and see what I find.

[denisw]

This could have something to do with WSL reporting the permissions of all files on the Windows filesystem as being 777. Git then regards all files as changed because their permissions are different.

Try changing the Git configuration so that permission changes are ignored:

# For the current repository
git config core.filemode false   

# Globally
git config --global core.filemode false

[nestalk]

It may be line endings,WSL thinks it is linux so it will use LF as the line endings.

You can set git to only use CRLF line endings with:

git config --global core.autocrlf true

[mjoppich]

I also think this might be line endings.

I have the very same problem between the "git bash" (mingw) and cygwin ...

[russalex]

Older thread so wanted to clean up.

Tried git config --global core.autocrlf true and it looked to clean up this issue.

Marking this one as fixes for now. I'll close it out as a cleanup in about a week if no additional comments / discussions.

[asher-dev]

Just a follow-up to this, since I had the same issue and this thread helped me:

The issue was only fixed when I changed the configuration for both core.autocrlf and core.filemode.
That is (for the local repository),
git config core.autocrlf true
git config core.filemode false

If I change either of them back to their original setting, every file in the repository is listed as modified.
On another note, unless you're certain that you will only be cloning repositories on git for Windows, I don't recommend changing the --global setting.

[tdaniely]

I came across this today, setting both autocrlf=true & filemode=false both globally and in the repo config doesn't work. git status still shows all files as changed.

git version 2.7.4
UbuntuOnWindows version 1604.2017.922.0
Ubuntu release is Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS

Repository was originally cloned with git-for-windows. where autocrlf is also true globally.
Actual files on disk have CRLF.