git diff on shell scripts

Question

I want to add shell scripts (".sh") into a git repository. But when viewing them in the git web interface it recognises them as binary files. Therefore I can not view them online or see diffs between different commits.

Is there a way to tell git how to handle these shell scripts?

Answer 1

You can tell git that these files are text files using the .gitattributes file. The simplest way is to say that all .sh files are text. Put this in a .gitattributes file in your repository root:

*.sh    text

This might not fix your issue, though. When you say 'git web interface', do you mean 'Github'? I couldn't find any documentation about whether Github uses the .gitattributes file when determining the file type. But this will let you run git diff on your local repository, at least.

There's some more documentation about .gitattributes in the Pro Git book. That approaches things in the other way, though: making binary files available as text, for meaningful diffs.