Ubuntu Manpage: git-restore-mtime - Restore original modification time of files based on the date of the

Provided by: git-restore-mtime_2022.07-1_all

NAME

       git-restore-mtime - Restore original modification time of files based on the date of the
       most recent commit that modified them

SYNOPSIS

       git-restore-mtime [-h] [--quiet|--verbose]
                         [-C DIRECTORY] [--work-tree WORKDIR] [--git-dir GITDIR]
                         [--force] [--merge] [--first-parent] [--skip-missing]
                         [--no-directories] [--test] [--commit-time] [--oldest-time]
                         [--skip-older-than SECONDS] [--unique-times] [--version]
                         [PATHSPEC [PATHSPEC...]]

DESCRIPTION

       Change the modification time (mtime) of files in the work tree based on the date of the
       most recent commit that modified the file, as an attempt to restore the original
       modification time. Useful when generating release tarballs.

       Ignore untracked files and uncommitted deletions, additions and renames, and by default
       modifications too.

OPTIONS

Positional arguments:
PATHSPEC
Only modify paths matching PATHSPEC, relative to current directory. By default,
update all but untracked files and submodules.

Optional arguments:
-h, --help
show help message and exit

--quiet,-q
Suppress informative messages and summary statistics.

--verbose,-v
Print additional information for each processed file. Specify twice to further
increase verbosity.

-C DIRECTORY, --cwd DIRECTORY
Run as if restore-mtime was started in directory DIRECTORY. This affects how
--work-tree, --git-dir and PATHSPEC arguments are handled. See git(1) for more
information.

--git-dir GITDIR
Path to the git repository, by default auto-discovered by searching the current
directory and its parents for a .git/ subdirectory.

--work-tree WORKDIR
Path to the work tree root, by default the parent of GITDIR if it's automatically
discovered, or the current directory if GITDIR is set.

--force, -f
Force updating files with uncommitted modifications. Untracked files and
uncommitted deletions, renames and additions are always ignored.

--merge, -m
Include merge commits. Leads to more recent times and more files per commit, thus
with the same time, which may or may not be what you want. Including merge
commits may lead to fewer commits being evaluated as files are found sooner, which
can improve performance, sometimes substantially. But as merge commits are
usually huge, processing them may also take longer. By default, merge commits are
only used for files missing from regular commits.

--first-parent
Consider only the first parent, the "main branch", when evaluating merge commits.
Only effective when merge commits are processed, either when --merge is used or
when finding missing files after the first regular log search. See --skip-
missing.

--skip-missing, -s
Do not try to find missing files. If merge commits were not evaluated with
--merge and some files were not found in regular commits, by default restore-mtime
searches for these files again in the merge commits. This option disables this
retry, so files found only in merge commits will not have their timestamp updated.

--no-directories, -D
Do not update directory timestamps. By default, use the time of its most recently
created, renamed or deleted file. Note that just modifying a file will NOT update
its directory time.

--test, -t
Test run: do not actually update any file timestamp.

--commit-time, -c
Use commit time instead of author time.

--oldest-time, -o
Update times based on the oldest, instead of the most recent commit of a file.
This reverses the order in which the git log is processed to emulate a file
"creation" date. Note this will be inaccurate for files deleted and re-created at
later dates.

--skip-older-than SECONDS
Ignore files that are currently older than SECONDS. Useful in workflows that
assume such files already have a correct timestamp, as it may improve performance
by processing fewer files.

--skip-older-than-commit, -N
Ignore files older than the timestamp it would be updated to. Such files may be
considered "original", likely in the author's repository.

--unique-times
Set the microseconds to a unique value per commit. Allows telling apart changes
that would otherwise have identical timestamps, as git's time accuracy is in
seconds.

--version, -V
show program's version number and exit

KNOWN ISSUES

       Renames are poorly handled: it always changes the timestamps of files, even if no content
       was modified.
       Directory timestamps are also limited to being modified only when files are added
       (created) or deleted in them.
       In very large repositories, after running restore-mtime to modify the timestamp of several
       files, further git operations may emit the error:
         fatal: mmap failed: Cannot allocate memory.
       This is harmless, and can be fixed by running git-status(1).

AUTHOR