A path to which the `diff` attribute is unspecified
first gets its contents inspected, and if it looks like
- text, it is treated as text. Otherwise it would
- generate `Binary files differ`.
+ text and is smaller than core.bigFileThreshold, it is treated
+ as text. Otherwise it would generate `Binary files differ`.
String::
may want to override its decision, either because a blob contains binary
data later in the file, or because the content, while technically
composed of text characters, is opaque to a human reader. For example,
-many postscript files contain only ascii characters, but produce noisy
+many postscript files contain only ASCII characters, but produce noisy
and meaningless diffs.
The simplest way to mark a file as binary is to unset the diff
However, one may also want to specify other diff driver attributes. For
example, you might want to use `textconv` to convert postscript files to
-an ascii representation for human viewing, but otherwise treat them as
+an ASCII representation for human viewing, but otherwise treat them as
binary files. You cannot specify both `-diff` and `diff=ps` attributes.
The solution is to use the `diff.*.binary` config option:
DEFINING MACRO ATTRIBUTES
-------------------------
-Custom macro attributes can be defined only in the `.gitattributes`
-file at the toplevel (i.e. not in any subdirectory). The built-in
-macro attribute "binary" is equivalent to:
+Custom macro attributes can be defined only in top-level gitattributes
+files (`$GIT_DIR/info/attributes`, the `.gitattributes` file at the
+top level of the working tree, or the global or system-wide
+gitattributes files), not in `.gitattributes` files in working tree
+subdirectories. The built-in macro attribute "binary" is equivalent
+to:
------------
[attr]binary -diff -merge -text