Month: June 2014

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Configuring Git

I needed to configure Git on a new server recently (no GUI), and couldn’t remember my typical configuration.

Disable Output Color-Coding

Many developers can’t live without color-coded command-line output, but I find at best it’s hard to read and distracting, and at worst absolutely incompressible with high ambient lighting and some screen glare. To disable color-coded command line output from Git:

$ git config --global color.ui false
$ git config --global color.diff false
$ git config --global color.status false
$ git config --global color.branch false
$ git config --global color.interactive false

Ignore File-Mode Changes

Git may report that executable files (e.g. shell scripts) have been modified based on differences in file mode interpretation between Unix and Windows systems. If the mode of a file is set to executable and committed to a Git repository in a Unix environment, and then the repository cloned into a Windows environment, the file will be reported by Git in Windows as having been modified – based on its mode. This is the result of subtle differences between a Unix file system and a Windows file system. Committing the “modified” file in Windows and pushing the repository changes back to the Unix repository will result in the file not being executable in Unix (until its file mode is set back to executable).

If this is an issue for you, set your Windows global Git config (~/.gitconfig) to ignore file mode changes (but first, check that your global configuration will not be overridden by a repository configuration).

Check your global and local configs:

$ git config --global core.filemode
$ cd gitrepo
$ git config core.filemode

Set configuration to ignore file mode changes:

$ git config --global core.filemode false
$ cd gitrepo
$ git config core.filemode false
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Flattening a directory structure on Windows

The other day I needed to copy all the files within a hierarchical directory structure in a shared network directory into a single directory. Here’s how I did it.

1) install the following GnuWin32 utilities from http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages.html (this is much simpler than and add the bin directory (c:\Program Files\GnuWin32\bin) to your PATH environment variable.

  • CoreUtils
  • FindUtils
  • sed

2) Check the shared network directory for files with the same name, and either change names or delete files before copying. My shared network directory is mapped as I:\Share.

C:\>I:
I:\>cd I:\Share
I:\Share>"c:\Program Files\GnuWin32\bin\find.exe" . -type f | sed "s/.*\///" | sort | uniq -d

The full path to “find” is needed because, although the GnuWin32 bin directory is on my command path, the Windows “find” command is found on my path before the GnuWin32 “find”. This can take some time – 15 minutes on a 5 year old laptop with a shared directory having 170k files and 22K directories!

3) Copy the files into a new “files” directory on X-drive:

I:\Share>mkdir X:\files
I:\Share>cp `find . -type f` X:\files

Done!

P.S. Thanks to ldenneau for the idea (http://ask.metafilter.com/62308/Easy-Windows-directory-flattening-with-minimal-tools)