NAME

       git-commit-tree - Create a new commit object

SYNOPSIS

       git commit-tree <tree> [(-p <parent>)...] < changelog
       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.

       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.

       -S[<keyid>]
           GPG-sign commit.

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 and committer information
       is taken from the following environment variables, if set:

           GIT_AUTHOR_NAME
           GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL
           GIT_AUTHOR_DATE
           GIT_COMMITTER_NAME
           GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL
           GIT_COMMITTER_DATE

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

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

       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 2 hours ahead UTC) is +0200.

       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

       At the core level, Git is character encoding agnostic.

       •   The pathnames recorded in the index and in the tree objects are treated as
           uninterpreted sequences of non-NUL bytes. What readdir(2) returns are what are
           recorded and compared with the data Git keeps track of, which in turn are expected to
           be what lstat(2) and creat(2) accepts. There is no such thing as pathname encoding
           translation.

       •   The contents of the blob objects are uninterpreted sequences of bytes. There is no
           encoding translation at the core level.

       •   The commit log messages are uninterpreted sequences of non-NUL bytes.

       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

       Part of the git(1) suite