GIT-AM

Section: Git Manual (1)
Updated: 09/22/2011

NAME

git-am - Apply a series of patches from a mailbox

SYNOPSIS

git am [--signoff] [--keep] [--keep-cr | --no-keep-cr] [--utf8 | --no-utf8]
         [--3way] [--interactive] [--committer-date-is-author-date]
         [--ignore-date] [--ignore-space-change | --ignore-whitespace]
         [--whitespace=<option>] [-C<n>] [-p<n>] [--directory=<dir>]
         [--reject] [-q | --quiet] [--scissors | --no-scissors]
         [<mbox> | <Maildir>...]
git am (--continue | --skip | --abort)

DESCRIPTION

Splits mail messages in a mailbox into commit log message, authorship information and patches, and applies them to the current branch.

OPTIONS

<mbox>|<Maildir>...

: The list of mailbox files to read patches from. If you do not supply this argument, the command reads from the standard input. If you supply directories, they will be treated as Maildirs.

-s, --signoff

: Add a Signed-off-by: line to the commit message, using the committer identity of yourself.

-k, --keep

: Pass -k flag to git mailinfo (see git-mailinfo(1)).

--keep-cr, --no-keep-cr

: With --keep-cr, call git mailsplit (see git-mailsplit(1)) with the same option, to prevent it from stripping CR at the end of lines. am.keepcr configuration variable can be used to specify the default behaviour. --no-keep-cr is useful to override am.keepcr.

-c, --scissors

: Remove everything in body before a scissors line (see git-mailinfo(1)).

--no-scissors

: Ignore scissors lines (see git-mailinfo(1)).

-q, --quiet

: Be quiet. Only print error messages.

-u, --utf8

: Pass -u flag to git mailinfo (see git-mailinfo(1)). The proposed commit log message taken from the e-mail is re-coded into UTF-8 encoding (configuration variable i18n.commitencoding can be used to specify project's preferred encoding if it is not UTF-8).
This was optional in prior versions of git, but now it is the default. You can use --no-utf8 to override this.

--no-utf8

: Pass -n flag to git mailinfo (see git-mailinfo(1)).

-3, --3way

: When the patch does not apply cleanly, fall back on 3-way merge if the patch records the identity of blobs it is supposed to apply to and we have those blobs available locally.

--ignore-date, --ignore-space-change, --ignore-whitespace, --whitespace=<option>, -C<n>, -p<n>, --directory=<dir>, --reject

: These flags are passed to the git apply (see git-apply(1)) program that applies the patch.

-i, --interactive

: Run interactively.

--committer-date-is-author-date

: By default the command records the date from the e-mail message as the commit author date, and uses the time of commit creation as the committer date. This allows the user to lie about the committer date by using the same value as the author date.

--ignore-date

: By default the command records the date from the e-mail message as the commit author date, and uses the time of commit creation as the committer date. This allows the user to lie about the author date by using the same value as the committer date.

--skip

: Skip the current patch. This is only meaningful when restarting an aborted patch.

--continue, -r, --resolved

: After a patch failure (e.g. attempting to apply conflicting patch), the user has applied it by hand and the index file stores the result of the application. Make a commit using the authorship and commit log extracted from the e-mail message and the current index file, and continue.

--resolvemsg=<msg>

: When a patch failure occurs, <msg> will be printed to the screen before exiting. This overrides the standard message informing you to use --resolved or --skip to handle the failure. This is solely for internal use between git rebase and git am.

--abort

: Restore the original branch and abort the patching operation.

DISCUSSION

The commit author name is taken from the "From: " line of the message, and commit author date is taken from the "Date: " line of the message. The "Subject: " line is used as the title of the commit, after stripping common prefix "[PATCH <anything>]". The "Subject: " line is supposed to concisely describe what the commit is about in one line of text.

"From: " and "Subject: " lines starting the body override the respective commit author name and title values taken from the headers.

The commit message is formed by the title taken from the "Subject: ", a blank line and the body of the message up to where the patch begins. Excess whitespace at the end of each line is automatically stripped.

The patch is expected to be inline, directly following the message. Any line that is of the form:

: • three-dashes and end-of-line, or

: • a line that begins with "diff -", or

: • a line that begins with "Index: "

is taken as the beginning of a patch, and the commit log message is terminated before the first occurrence of such a line.

When initially invoking git am, you give it the names of the mailboxes to process. Upon seeing the first patch that does not apply, it aborts in the middle. You can recover from this in one of two ways:

: 1. skip the current patch by re-running the command with the --skip option.

: 2. hand resolve the conflict in the working directory, and update the index file to bring it into a state that the patch should have produced. Then run the command with the --resolved option.

The command refuses to process new mailboxes while the .git/rebase-apply directory exists, so if you decide to start over from scratch, run rm -f -r .git/rebase-apply before running the command with mailbox names.

Before any patches are applied, ORIG_HEAD is set to the tip of the current branch. This is useful if you have problems with multiple commits, like running git am on the wrong branch or an error in the commits that is more easily fixed by changing the mailbox (e.g. errors in the "From:" lines).