git-am - Apply a series of patches from a mailbox
git am [--signoff] [--keep] [--[no-]keep-cr] [--[no-]utf8] [--[no-]verify]
[--[no-]3way] [--interactive] [--committer-date-is-author-date]
[--ignore-date] [--ignore-space-change | --ignore-whitespace]
[--whitespace=<action>] [-C<n>] [-p<n>] [--directory=<dir>]
[--exclude=<path>] [--include=<path>] [--reject] [-q | --quiet]
[--[no-]scissors] [-S[<keyid>]] [--patch-format=<format>]
[--quoted-cr=<action>]
[--empty=(stop|drop|keep)]
[(<mbox> | <Maildir>)...]
git am (--continue | --skip | --abort | --quit | --retry | --show-current-patch[=(diff|raw)] | --allow-empty)
Splits mail messages in a mailbox into commit log messages,
authorship information, and patches, and applies them to the current branch.
You could think of it as a reverse operation of git-format-patch(1)
run on a branch with a straight history without merges.
(<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 trailer to the commit message
(see git-interpret-trailers(1)), using the committer identity of
yourself. See the signoff option in git-commit(1) for more
information.
-k, --keep
Pass -k flag to git-mailinfo(1).
--keep-non-patch
Pass -b flag to git-mailinfo(1).
--keep-cr, --no-keep-cr
With --keep-cr, call 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)). Can be activated by default using the
mailinfo.scissors configuration variable.
--no-scissors
Ignore scissors lines (see git-mailinfo(1)).
--quoted-cr=<action>
This flag will be passed down to
git-mailinfo(1).
--empty=(drop|keep|stop)
How to handle an e-mail message lacking a patch:
drop
The e-mail message will be skipped.
keep
An empty commit will be created, with the contents of the
e-mail message as its log.
stop
The command will fail, stopping in the middle of the
current am session. This is the default behavior.
-m, --message-id
Pass the -m flag to git-mailinfo(1), so
that the Message-ID header is added to the commit message. The
am.messageid configuration variable can be used to specify the default
behaviour.
--no-message-id
Do not add the Message-ID header to the commit message.
--no-message-id is useful to override am.messageid.
-q, --quiet
Be quiet. Only print error messages.
-u, --utf8
Pass
-u flag to
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 the 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(1).
-3, --3way, --no-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. --no-3way can be used to
override am.threeWay configuration variable. For more information, see
am.threeWay in git-config(1).
--rerere-autoupdate, --no-rerere-autoupdate
After the rerere mechanism reuses a recorded resolution
on the current conflict to update the files in the working tree, allow it to
also update the index with the result of resolution.
--no-rerere-autoupdate is a good way to double-check what
git-rerere(1) did and catch potential mismerges, before committing the
result to the index with a separate git-add(1).
--ignore-space-change, --ignore-whitespace,
--whitespace=<action>, -C<n>, -p<n>,
--directory=<dir>, --exclude=<path>, --include=<path>,
--reject
These flags are passed to the
git-apply(1) program
that applies the patch.
Valid <action> for the --whitespace option are:
nowarn, warn, fix, error, and
error-all.
--patch-format
By default the command will try to detect the patch
format automatically. This option allows the user to bypass the automatic
detection and specify the patch format that the patch(es) should be
interpreted as. Valid formats are mbox, mboxrd, stgit, stgit-series, and
hg.
-i, --interactive
Run interactively.
--verify, -n, --no-verify
Run the
pre-applypatch and
applypatch-msg
hooks. This is the default. Skip these hooks with
-n or
--no-verify. See also
githooks(5).
Note that post-applypatch cannot be skipped.
--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.
Warning
The history walking machinery assumes that commits have non-decreasing commit
timestamps. You should consider if you really need to use this option. Then
you should only use this option to override the committer date when applying
commits on top of a base which commit is older (in terms of the commit date)
than the oldest patch you are applying.
--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.
-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 both
commit.gpgSign configuration variable, and earlier
--gpg-sign.
--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 --continue or --skip to handle the failure. This is
solely for internal use between git-rebase(1) and
git-am(1).
--abort
Restore the original branch and abort the patching
operation. Revert the contents of files involved in the am operation to their
pre-am state.
--quit
Abort the patching operation but keep HEAD and the index
untouched.
--retry
Try to apply the last conflicting patch again. This is
generally only useful for passing extra options to the retry attempt (e.g.,
--3way), since otherwise you’ll just see the same failure
again.
--show-current-patch[=(diff|raw)]
Show the message at which git-am(1) has stopped
due to conflicts. If raw is specified, show the raw contents of the
e-mail message; if diff, show the diff portion only. Defaults to
raw.
--allow-empty
After a patch failure on an input e-mail message lacking
a patch, create an empty commit with the contents of the e-mail message as its
log message.
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: ", "Date: ", 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.
This means that the contents of the commit message can
inadvertently interrupt the processing (see the CAVEATS section below).
When initially invoking git-am(1), 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 --continue option.
The command refuses to process new mailboxes until the current
operation is finished, so if you decide to start over from scratch, run
git am --abort 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(1) 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).
The output from git-format-patch(1) can lead to a different
commit message when applied with git-am(1). The patch that is applied
may also be different from the one that was generated, or patch application
may fail outright. See the DISCUSSION section above for the syntactic
rules.
Note that this is especially problematic for unindented diffs that
occur in the commit message; the diff in the commit message might get
applied along with the patch section, or the patch application machinery
might trip up because the patch target doesn’t apply. This could for
example be caused by a diff in a Markdown code block.
The solution for this is to indent the diff or other text that
could cause problems.
This loss of fidelity might be simple to notice if you are
applying patches directly from a mailbox. However, changes originating from
Git could be applied in bulk, in which case this would be much harder to
notice. This could for example be a Linux distribution which uses patch
files to apply changes on top of the commits from the upstream repositories.
This goes to show that this behavior does not only impact email
workflows.
Given these limitations, one might be tempted to use a
general-purpose utility like patch(1) instead. However, patch(1) will not
only look for unindented diffs (like git-am(1)) but will try to apply
indented diffs as well.
This command can run applypatch-msg, pre-applypatch,
and post-applypatch hooks. See githooks(5) for more
information.
See the --verify/-n/--no-verify options.
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:
am.keepcr
If true, git-am(1) will call
git-mailsplit(1) for patches in mbox format with parameter
--keep-cr. In this case git-mailsplit(1) will not remove
\r from lines ending with \r\n. Can be overridden by giving
--no-keep-cr from the command line.
am.threeWay
By default, git-am(1) will fail if the patch does
not apply cleanly. When set to true, this setting tells git-am(1) to
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 (equivalent to
giving the --3way option from the command line). Defaults to
false.
am.messageId
Add a Message-ID trailer based on the email header
to the commit when using git-am(1) (see
git-interpret-trailers(1)). See also the --message-id and
--no-message-id options.
git-apply(1), git-format-patch(1).