GIT-COMMIT-TREE(1) Git Manual GIT-COMMIT-TREE(1)

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>], --no-gpg-sign
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 is useful to countermand a
--gpg-sign option given earlier on the command line.

COMMIT INFORMATION

A commit encapsulates:

+o all parent object ids

+o author name, email and date

+o 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 and 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 date 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. Fractional parts of a second will be ignored,
for example 2005-04-07T22:13:13.019 will be treated as
2005-04-07T22:13:13.

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.

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

+o 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.

+o 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 issue 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 their 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

Git 2.48.1 2025-01-13 GIT-COMMIT-TREE(1)