When working with Git, you may encounter situations where file permission changes (chmod) are unintentionally tracked as changes in your repository. This can happen when Git detects file permission modifications and flags them as changes, even though you may not want these changes to be included in your version control history.

To make Git ignore file permission changes, you can utilize the git update-index command along with the –chmod option. This option instructs Git to ignore changes in file permissions when detecting modifications in your working directory.

Here’s a detailed guide on how to make Git ignore file permission changes:

Step 1: Identify Files with Unwanted Permission Changes

Before proceeding, it’s essential to identify the files in your repository that are experiencing unwanted permission changes. These files may include scripts, executables, or configuration files that should have specific permissions but are being modified inadvertently.

Step 2: Verify the Status of the Files

Use the git status command to verify the status of files in your repository and identify any changes in file permissions that you want to ignore. Look for files marked as modified due to permission changes.

git status

Step 3: Update Index with –chmod Option

For each file with unwanted permission changes, use the git update-index command with the –chmod option to instruct Git to ignore permission changes for that file.

git update-index --chmod=-x <file_name>

Replace <file_name> with the name of the file for which you want to ignore permission changes. The -x option specifies that execution permissions should be ignored. You can use -x to ignore changes in execution permissions, or -w to ignore changes in write permissions.

Step 4: Commit Changes

git commit -m "Ignore file permission changes"

Step 5: Verify Ignored Changes

After committing your changes, verify that Git is now ignoring permission changes for the specified files. Use git status to ensure that the files are no longer flagged as modified due to permission changes.

Once you’ve updated the index to ignore permission changes for the desired files, commit your changes to the repository.

git status

Step 6: Ignore Permission Changes Globally (Optional)

If you want to ignore permission changes globally for all files in your repository, you can configure Git to ignore permission changes by default. This can be achieved by setting the core.fileMode configuration option to false.

How to make Git ignore file permission (chmod) changes

In Git, you can configure it to ignore file permission (chmod) changes by setting the core.fileMode option to false. This option controls whether Git tracks executable bit changes on files.

Here’s how you can do it:

1. Set core.fileMode for a single repository

To set this option for a single repository, navigate to the repository’s directory and run the following command:

git config core.fileMode false

This will update the .git/config file in the repository to include the setting, ensuring that Git will ignore permission changes for files in this repository.

2. Set core.fileMode globally

If you want to apply this setting to all of your repositories, you can set it globally by adding the --global flag:

git config --global core.fileMode false

This updates the global Git configuration file, which is typically located at ~/.gitconfig, and applies the setting to all repositories for your user.

Verification

To verify that the setting has been applied, you can check the configuration:

• For a single repository:

git config core.fileMode

• For the global configuration:

git config --global core.fileMode

Both commands should output false if the setting has been correctly applied.

By setting core.fileMode to false, Git will no longer track changes to the file mode, thus ignoring permission changes. This is particularly useful in environments where file permissions might change automatically, such as when using different operating systems or certain development tools.