Question on Clean/Smudge Infrastructure

Hi Git,

I have a edge use case that I would like to ask about.

Given a directory with a large number, say 100, text files, and a few scattered binary files - specified in .gitattributes as binary, what does clean smudge do with the binary files if they match the filter specification pattern? Are they ignored or processed. I am not sure that passing binary via stdin is necessarily portable. However, I would like to be able to explicitly ignore the binary files in my clean/smudge filters - either by doing a copy stdin/stdout (as I said, probably not portable), or sending a non-zero exit code, or some other mechanism. The root of the use case is that the directory is subject to significant changes over time, and errors are sneaking in when people forget to update .gitattributes or name the files incorrectly. I would like to make their situation more stable to errors.

Thanks, Randall

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