GIT-MAILINFO(1) Git Manual GIT-MAILINFO(1)

NAME

git-mailinfo - Extracts patch and authorship from a single e-mail
message

SYNOPSIS

git mailinfo [-k|-b] [-u | --encoding=<encoding> | -n]
[--[no-]scissors] [--quoted-cr=<action>]
<msg> <patch>

DESCRIPTION

Reads a single e-mail message from the standard input, and writes the
commit log message in <msg> file, and the patches in <patch> file.
The author name, e-mail and e-mail subject are written out to the
standard output to be used by git am to create a commit. It is
usually not necessary to use this command directly. See git-am(1)
instead.

OPTIONS

-k
Usually the program removes email cruft from the Subject: header
line to extract the title line for the commit log message. This
option prevents this munging, and is most useful when used to
read back git format-patch -k output.

Specifically, the following are removed until none of them
remain:

+o Leading and trailing whitespace.

+o Leading Re:, re:, and :.

+o Leading bracketed strings (between [ and ], usually [PATCH]).

Finally, runs of whitespace are normalized to a single ASCII
space character.

-b
When -k is not in effect, all leading strings bracketed with [
and ] pairs are stripped. This option limits the stripping to
only the pairs whose bracketed string contains the word "PATCH".

-u
The commit log message, author name and author email are taken
from the e-mail, and after minimally decoding MIME transfer
encoding, re-coded in the charset specified by
i18n.commitEncoding (defaulting to UTF-8) by transliterating
them. This used to be optional but now it is the default.

Note that the patch is always used as-is without charset
conversion, even with this flag.

--encoding=<encoding>
Similar to -u. But when re-coding, the charset specified here is
used instead of the one specified by i18n.commitEncoding or
UTF-8.

-n
Disable all charset re-coding of the metadata.

-m, --message-id
Copy the Message-ID header at the end of the commit message. This
is useful in order to associate commits with mailing list
discussions.

--scissors
Remove everything in body before a scissors line (e.g. "-- >8
--"). The line represents scissors and perforation marks, and is
used to request the reader to cut the message at that line. If
that line appears in the body of the message before the patch,
everything before it (including the scissors line itself) is
ignored when this option is used.

This is useful if you want to begin your message in a discussion
thread with comments and suggestions on the message you are
responding to, and to conclude it with a patch submission,
separating the discussion and the beginning of the proposed
commit log message with a scissors line.

This can be enabled by default with the configuration option
mailinfo.scissors.

--no-scissors
Ignore scissors lines. Useful for overriding mailinfo.scissors
settings.

--quoted-cr=<action>
Action when processes email messages sent with base64 or
quoted-printable encoding, and the decoded lines end with a CRLF
instead of a simple LF.

The valid actions are:

+o nowarn: Git will do nothing when such a CRLF is found.

+o warn: Git will issue a warning for each message if such a
CRLF is found.

+o strip: Git will convert those CRLF to LF.

The default action could be set by configuration option
mailinfo.quotedCR. If no such configuration option has been set,
warn will be used.

<msg>
The commit log message extracted from e-mail, usually except the
title line which comes from e-mail Subject.

<patch>
The patch extracted from e-mail.

CONFIGURATION

Everything below this line in this section is selectively included
from the git-config(1) documentation. The content is the same as
what's found there:

mailinfo.scissors
If true, makes git-mailinfo(1) (and therefore git-am(1)) act by
default as if the --scissors option was provided on the
command-line. When active, this feature removes everything from
the message body before a scissors line (i.e. consisting mainly
of ">8", "8<" and "-").

GIT

Part of the git(1) suite

Git 2.48.1 2025-01-13 GIT-MAILINFO(1)