> Can you tell git that the bash script is a binary file and therefore should not automatically convert the contents of the file?

That'd be swatting a fly with a sledgehammer; if you do that, $(git diff) will no longer work which smells important for shell scripts that evolve over time. But I think you were in the right ballpark in that .gitattributes is designed for helping it understand the behavior you wish with eol=lf just for either that file or *.sh *.bash etc https://git-scm.com/docs/gitattributes#Documentation/gitattr...