Checking the attributes of a file

Checking the .gitattributes file (or other places where attributes can be defined) to see whether a specific file is affected by an attribute can be quite cumbersome, especially if there are many entries in these files. Git has a built-in method that can be used to tell whether a file has any attribute associated.

Getting ready

We'll use the attributes_example repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/dvaske/attributes_example.git
$ cd attributes_example

How to do it...

We'll start by setting up all the attributes we had in the last example:

$ echo '*.jpg filter=binstore' > .gitattributes
$ echo '*.jpg diff=exif-diff' >> .gitattributes
$ echo "*.c filter=date-keyword" >> .gitattributes
$ echo "*.java filter=date-keyword" >> .gitattributes

Now we are ready to check different files. We'll start on the keyword branch and check the two code files using the following command:

$ git checkout keyword
Branch keyword set up to track remote branch...