Applying .gitattributes text/eol changes

I'm looking for an unobtrusive way to apply (committed) changes for text/eol attributes to the working tree. For instance, after having changed "*.txt eol=crlf" to "*.txt eol=lf", all *.txt files should be converted from CRLF to LF endings. The only advice I found so far is to remove .git/index and do a reset --hard. The disadvantage of this approach is that every file will be touched:

- although the content does not change, timestamps will be changed. This
makes tools like IDEs assume that the file content has been changed.
(Even if the timestamps would be properly reset, the replacement of the
files would have triggered system file change notifications and I'd
expect various tools to still reload these files)

- there will be warnings for files which are locked by other processes
(at least on Windows). I'm usually seeing this for JAR files which are
not affected by eol-attribute changes at all.

One solution I could think of which might be helpful in other situations as well would be to have an "--unobtrusive" option for reset which would only replace a file if the content has actually been changed.

Marc.