It’s possible for Git to think there have been changes to files when only permissions have changed. This is something that is pretty common if you work across multiple operating systems, and it can be annoying.

For example, running “git status” showed that two of my icon files had changed, but hadn’t edited them. Running “git diff” showed that it was just the file mode properties (permissions or “props”) that had changed.

$ git diff
diff –git a/images/samplitron_largeicon.png b/images/samplitron_largeicon.png
old mode 100644
new mode 100755
diff –git a/images/samplitron_largeicon.xcf b/images/samplitron_largeicon.xcf
old mode 100644
new mode 100755

To make Git stop treating this as a change, there’s a command you can run:

git config –global core.fileMode false

Now when you run “git status” or “git diff”, file mode changes will be ignored.