Spurious Carriage Return breaks diff tool

[stravant]

• I was not able to find an open or closed issue matching what I'm seeing

Setup

• Which version of Git for Windows are you using? Is it 32-bit or 64-bit?

git version 2.17.1.windows.2
cpu: x86_64
built from commit: a60968cf435951d9411fc0f980a2e362d5cccea2
sizeof-long: 4

• Which version of Windows are you running? Vista, 7, 8, 10? Is it 32-bit or 64-bit?

Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.17134.407]

• What options did you set as part of the installation? Or did you choose the
  defaults?

Editor Option: VisualStudioCode
Path Option: Cmd
SSH Option: OpenSSH
CURL Option: OpenSSL
CRLF Option: CRLFAlways
Bash Terminal Option: MinTTY
Performance Tweaks FSCache: Enabled
Use Credential Manager: Enabled
Enable Symlinks: Disabled

Details

• Which terminal/shell are you running Git from? e.g Bash/CMD/PowerShell/other

Tested and reproduced using both Git Bash and CMD.

• What commands did you run to trigger this issue? If you can provide a
  Minimal, Complete, and Verifiable example
  this will help us understand the issue.

git init
[Create list-of-words.txt, containing some lines of text, with CRLF line endings]
git add list-of-words.txt
git commit -m "Initial Commit"
[Edit list of words adding a naked Carriage Return character without a corresponding Line Feed in the middle of the list]
git diff

• What did you expect to occur after running these commands?

The diff should show that a single line change where a carriage return (^M) was added in the middle of the file.

• What actually happened instead?

The diff tool thinks that the entire file changed.

[tboegi]

Could you run
git config -l | grep core.autocrlf
and
git ls-files --eol
and post the output here, please ?

[stravant]

git config -l | grep core.autocrlf -> core.autocrlf=true

ls-files before adding the suprious carriage return:
i/lf w/crlf attr/ list.txt

And after:
i/-text w/-text attr/ list.txt

[tboegi]

Thanks.
The thing is the "auto" treats file with a single CR as binary.
And that "binary" switches the CRLF conversion off, and suddenly ALL lines are changed.

The solution would be to use a .gitattributes file:
echo "list.txt text" >>.gitattributes

or better:
echo "* text=auto" >.gitattributes
echo "list.txt text" >>.gitattributes
git add .gitattributes
git commit -m "Add .gitattributes"

[stravant]

Even though there are carriage returns in the files normally, a naked one looks like a random binary byte and makes the file binary...

That makes perfect sense actually. Thanks.