How to recover a git repository that has been corrupted by having line endings changes from CRLF to LF?

Question

I changed all of the line endings in my project from dos mode to unix mode by removing all of the carriage returns from any file that had them:

grep -lIUr '^M' . | xargs sed -i 's/^M//'

I thought that it would ignore hidden dotfiles like .git/, but it didn't, and now my git repository has been mangled.

git fsck

gives

Checking object directories: 100% (256/256), done.
error: inflate: data stream error (incorrect data check)
fatal: loose object 62f7323e2a025640a25214f13a670097876c1683 (stored in .git/objects/62/f7323e2a025640a25214f13a670097876c1683) is corrupt

There aren't any other copies of the repository checked out anywhere. Is there any way to recover from this? Is my repo dead?

Answer 1

Yes, it is. No luck, since all ^M are gone: maybe you can partially recover history and build another repo, but nothing more.

For the future, use greater care and proper tools like dos2unix for converting line endings.

Answer 2

In the future (does not help you now), you can limit your command to files in the repository.

grep -lIUr '^M' `git ls-files` | xargs sed -i 's/^M//'