How do I force git to checkout the master branch and remove carriage returns after I've normalized files using the "text" attribute?

Okay, so I added the file .gitattributes with lines like this

*.css text
*.js text
etc...

I then followed the instructions at http://git-scm.com/docs/gitattributes#_checking-out_and_checking-in

$ rm .git/index     # Remove the index to force Git to
$ git reset         # re-scan the working directory
$ git status        # Show files that will be normalized
$ git add -u
$ git add .gitattributes
$ git commit -m "Introduce end-of-line normalization"

But now my working copy still has the carriage returns! I have untracked files that I would like to keep. How do I have git checkout the master branch again with the normalized files?

I know the files are normalized in the repository because when I clone the repo, I have all the files without the carriage returns.

Ahah! Checkout the previous commit, then checkout the master.

git checkout HEAD^
git checkout -f master

As others have pointed out one could just delete all the files in the repo and then check them out. I prefer this method and it can be done with the code below

git ls-files -z | xargs -0 rm
git checkout -- .

or one line

git ls-files -z | xargs -0 rm ; git checkout -- .

I use it all the time and haven't found any down sides yet!

For some further explanation, the -z appends a null character onto the end of each entry output by ls-files, and the -0 tells xargs to delimit the output it was receiving by those null characters.

Stash (save) your changes

git stash

Take updated changes till the last commit from remote for your current branch (to start clean with no untracked/modified files .. just in case)

git checkout .

Now switch to the master branch

git checkout master