NAME

git-commit-tree - Create a new commit object

SYNOPSIS

  1. git commit-tree <tree> [(-p <parent>)…​]
  2. git commit-tree [(-p <parent>)…​] [-S[<keyid>]] [(-m <message>)…​]
  3.           [(-F <file>)…​] <tree>

DESCRIPTION

This is usually not what an end user wants to run directly. Seegit-commit[1] instead.

Creates a new commit object based on the provided tree object andemits the new commit object id on stdout. The log message is readfrom the standard input, unless -m or -F options are given.

The -m and -F options can be given any number of times, in anyorder. The commit log message will be composed in the order in whichthe options are given.

A commit object may have any number of parents. With exactly oneparent, it is an ordinary commit. Having more than one parent makesthe commit a merge between several lines of history. Initial (root)commits have no parents.

While a tree represents a particular directory state of a workingdirectory, a commit represents that state in "time", and explains howto get there.

Normally a commit would identify a new "HEAD" state, and while Gitdoesn’t care where you save the note about that state, in practice wetend to just write the result to the file that is pointed at by.git/HEAD, so that we can always see what the last committedstate was.

OPTIONS

  • An existing tree object.

  • -p

  • Each -p indicates the id of a parent commit object.

  • -m

  • A paragraph in the commit log message. This can be given more thanonce and each becomes its own paragraph.

  • -F

  • Read the commit log message from the given file. Use - to readfrom the standard input. This can be given more than once and thecontent of each file becomes its own paragraph.

  • -S[]

  • —gpg-sign[=]

  • GPG-sign commits. The keyid argument is optional anddefaults to the committer identity; if specified, it must bestuck to the option without a space.

  • —no-gpg-sign

  • Do not GPG-sign commit, to countermand a —gpg-sign optiongiven earlier on the command line.

Commit Information

A commit encapsulates:

  • all parent object ids

  • author name, email and date

  • committer name and email and the commit time.

While parent object ids are provided on the command line, author andcommitter information is taken from the following environment variables,if set:

  1. GIT_AUTHOR_NAME
  2. GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL
  3. GIT_AUTHOR_DATE
  4. GIT_COMMITTER_NAME
  5. GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL
  6. GIT_COMMITTER_DATE

(nb "<", ">" and "\n"s are stripped)

In case (some of) these environment variables are not set, the informationis taken from the configuration items user.name and user.email, or, if notpresent, the environment variable EMAIL, or, if that is not set,system user name and the hostname used for outgoing mail (takenfrom /etc/mailname and falling back to the fully qualified hostname whenthat file does not exist).

A commit comment is read from stdin. If a changelogentry is not provided via "<" redirection, git commit-tree will just waitfor one to be entered and terminated with ^D.

DATE FORMATS

The GIT_AUTHOR_DATE, GIT_COMMITTER_DATE environment variablessupport the following date formats:

  • Git internal format

  • It is <unix timestamp> <time zone offset>, where <unixtimestamp> is the number of seconds since the UNIX epoch.<time zone offset> is a positive or negative offset from UTC.For example CET (which is 1 hour ahead of UTC) is +0100.

  • RFC 2822

  • The standard email format as described by RFC 2822, for exampleThu, 07 Apr 2005 22:13:13 +0200.

  • ISO 8601

  • Time and date specified by the ISO 8601 standard, for example2005-04-07T22:13:13. The parser accepts a space instead of theT character as well.

NoteIn addition, the date part is accepted in the following formats:YYYY.MM.DD, MM/DD/YYYY and DD.MM.YYYY.

Discussion

Git is to some extent character encoding agnostic.

  • The contents of the blob objects are uninterpreted sequencesof bytes. There is no encoding translation at the corelevel.

  • Path names are encoded in UTF-8 normalization form C. Thisapplies to tree objects, the index file, ref names, as well aspath names in command line arguments, environment variablesand config files (.git/config (see git-config[1]),gitignore[5], gitattributes[5] andgitmodules[5]).

Note that Git at the core level treats path names simply assequences of non-NUL bytes, there are no path name encodingconversions (except on Mac and Windows). Therefore, usingnon-ASCII path names will mostly work even on platforms and filesystems that use legacy extended ASCII encodings. However,repositories created on such systems will not work properly onUTF-8-based systems (e.g. Linux, Mac, Windows) and vice versa.Additionally, many Git-based tools simply assume path names tobe UTF-8 and will fail to display other encodings correctly.

  • Commit log messages are typically encoded in UTF-8, but otherextended ASCII encodings are also supported. This includesISO-8859-x, CP125x and many others, but not UTF-16/32,EBCDIC and CJK multi-byte encodings (GBK, Shift-JIS, Big5,EUC-x, CP9xx etc.).

Although we encourage that the commit log messages are encodedin UTF-8, both the core and Git Porcelain are designed not toforce UTF-8 on projects. If all participants of a particularproject find it more convenient to use legacy encodings, Gitdoes not forbid it. However, there are a few things to keep inmind.

  • git commit and git commit-tree issuesa warning if the commit log message given to it does not looklike a valid UTF-8 string, unless you explicitly say yourproject uses a legacy encoding. The way to say this is tohave i18n.commitencoding in .git/config file, like this:
  1. [i18n]
  2.     commitEncoding = ISO-8859-1

Commit objects created with the above setting record the valueof i18n.commitEncoding in its encoding header. This is tohelp other people who look at them later. Lack of this headerimplies that the commit log message is encoded in UTF-8.

  • git log, git show, git blame and friends look at theencoding header of a commit object, and try to re-code thelog message into UTF-8 unless otherwise specified. You canspecify the desired output encoding withi18n.logOutputEncoding in .git/config file, like this:
  1. [i18n]
  2.     logOutputEncoding = ISO-8859-1

If you do not have this configuration variable, the value ofi18n.commitEncoding is used instead.

Note that we deliberately chose not to re-code the commit logmessage when a commit is made to force UTF-8 at the commitobject level, because re-coding to UTF-8 is not necessarily areversible operation.

FILES

/etc/mailname

SEE ALSO

git-write-tree[1]

GIT

Part of the git[1] suite