NAME

       git-commit-tree - Create a new commit object

SYNOPSIS

       git commit-tree <tree> [(-p <parent>)...]
       git commit-tree [(-p <parent>)...] [-S[<keyid>]] [(-m <message>)...]
                         [(-F <file>)...] <tree>

DESCRIPTION

       This is usually not what an end user wants to run directly. See git-commit(1) instead.

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

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

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

       While a tree represents a particular directory state of a working directory, a commit
       represents that state in "time", and explains how to get there.

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

OPTIONS

       <tree>
           An existing tree object.

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

       -m <message>
           A paragraph in the commit log message. This can be given more than once and each
           <message> becomes its own paragraph.

       -F <file>
           Read the commit log message from the given file. Use - to read from the standard
           input. This can be given more than once and the content of each file becomes its own
           paragraph.

       -S[<keyid>], --gpg-sign[=<keyid>]
           GPG-sign commits. The keyid argument is optional and defaults to the committer
           identity; if specified, it must be stuck to the option without a space.

       --no-gpg-sign
           Do not GPG-sign commit, to countermand a --gpg-sign option given 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.

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

DATE FORMATS

       The GIT_AUTHOR_DATE, GIT_COMMITTER_DATE environment variables support the following date
       formats:

       Git internal format
           It is <unix timestamp> <time zone offset>, where <unix timestamp> 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 example Thu, 07 Apr 2005
           22:13:13 +0200.

       ISO 8601
           Time and date specified by the ISO 8601 standard, for example 2005-04-07T22:13:13. The
           parser accepts a space instead of the T character as well.

               Note
               In 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 sequences of bytes. There is no
           encoding translation at the core level.

       •   Path names are encoded in UTF-8 normalization form C. This applies to tree objects,
           the index file, ref names, as well as path names in command line arguments,
           environment variables and config files (.git/config (see git-config(1)), gitignore(5),
           gitattributes(5) and gitmodules(5)).

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

       •   Commit log messages are typically encoded in UTF-8, but other extended ASCII encodings
           are also supported. This includes ISO-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 encoded in UTF-8, both the core and
       Git Porcelain are designed not to force UTF-8 on projects. If all participants of a
       particular project find it more convenient to use legacy encodings, Git does not forbid
       it. However, there are a few things to keep in mind.

        1. git commit and git commit-tree issues a warning if the commit log message given to it
           does not look like a valid UTF-8 string, unless you explicitly say your project uses a
           legacy encoding. The way to say this is to have i18n.commitencoding in .git/config
           file, like this:

               [i18n]
                       commitEncoding = ISO-8859-1

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

        2. git log, git show, git blame and friends look at the encoding header of a commit
           object, and try to re-code the log message into UTF-8 unless otherwise specified. You
           can specify the desired output encoding with i18n.logOutputEncoding in .git/config
           file, like this:

               [i18n]
                       logOutputEncoding = ISO-8859-1

           If you do not have this configuration variable, the value of i18n.commitEncoding is
           used instead.

       Note that we deliberately chose not to re-code the commit log message when a commit is
       made to force UTF-8 at the commit object level, because re-coding to UTF-8 is not
       necessarily a reversible operation.

FILES

       /etc/mailname

SEE ALSO

       git-write-tree(1) git-commit(1)

GIT

       Part of the git(1) suite