Re: AI Textconv filter misconfiguration on Windows leads to silent corruption of diff output (ongoing investigation)

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Aug 11, 2026, 03:40 UTC
Message-ID: <20260811034001.GA15552@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <AM0PR02MB445096594555DAD1D9EE1505B3DD2@AM0PR02MB4450.eurprd02.prod.outlook.com>

On Tue, Aug 11, 2026 at 12:44:42AM +0000, Skybuck Flying wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> - compareCache appeared as compaeCache
> - return appeared as eturn
> - from appeared as fom
> - var appeared as va
> - for appeared as fo
> - cacheReader appeared as cacheReade
> - CompareAndSwap appeared as CompaeAndSwap

So all of your r's are gone...

> Global .gitconfig:
> diff.lfclean.textconv=sed -e s/\r//

...and here you don't quote against the shell. So the shell is probably converting "\r" into just "r", and thus sed is removing them.

The same thing would be a problem on Linux as well as Windows.

I felt clever at spotting this immediately, but then this is already in your text later:

Show 5 quoted lines

> So the command does strip the literal character 'r' instead of
> carriage returns. The likely reason is that the backslash before r is
> not preserved through the shell argument parsing on Windows;
> effectively, the expression becomes s/r//, which deletes all 'r'
> characters.

So...what's the question? This is a misconfiguration on your part. Perhaps Git's documentation could be more clear that there will be a shell involved, but using a shell is normal for (almost) all user-specified commands run by Git.

-Peff