NAME

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

SYNOPSIS

git am [--signoff] [--keep] [--[no-]keep-cr] [--[no-]utf8]
     [--[no-]3way] [--interactive] [--committer-date-is-author-date]
     [--ignore-date] [--ignore-space-change | --ignore-whitespace]
     [--whitespace=<option>] [-C<n>] [-p<n>] [--directory=<dir>]
     [--exclude=<path>] [--include=<path>] [--reject] [-q | --quiet]
     [--[no-]scissors] [-S[<keyid>]] [--patch-format=<format>]
     [(<mbox> | <Maildir>)…​]
git am (--continue | --skip | --abort | --quit | --show-current-patch)

DESCRIPTION

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

OPTIONS

• (|)…​

• The list of mailbox files to read patches from. If you do notsupply 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, usingthe committer identity of yourself.See the signoff option in git-commit[1] for more information.

• -k

• —keep

• Pass -k flag to git mailinfo (see git-mailinfo[1]).

• —keep-non-patch

• Pass -b flag to git mailinfo (see git-mailinfo[1]).

• —[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 oflines. am.keepcr configuration variable can be used to specify thedefault behaviour. —no-keep-cr is useful to override am.keepcr.

• -c

• —scissors

• Remove everything in body before a scissors line (seegit-mailinfo[1]). Can be activated by default usingthe mailinfo.scissors configuration variable.

• —no-scissors

• Ignore scissors lines (see git-mailinfo[1]).

• -m

• —message-id

• Pass the -m flag to git mailinfo (see git-mailinfo[1]),so that the Message-ID header is added to the commit message.The am.messageid configuration variable can be used to specifythe 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 (see git-mailinfo[1]).The proposed commit log message taken from the e-mailis re-coded into UTF-8 encoding (configuration variablei18n.commitencoding can be used to specify project’spreferred encoding if it is not UTF-8).

This was optional in prior versions of git, but now it is thedefault. You can use —no-utf8 to override this.

• —no-utf8

• Pass -n flag to git mailinfo (seegit-mailinfo[1]).

• -3

• —3way
• —no-3way

• When the patch does not apply cleanly, fall back on3-way merge if the patch records the identity of blobsit is supposed to apply to and we have those blobsavailable locally. —no-3way can be used to overrideam.threeWay configuration variable. For more information,see am.threeWay in git-config[1].

• —rerere-autoupdate

• —no-rerere-autoupdate

• Allow the rerere mechanism to update the index with theresult of auto-conflict resolution if possible.

• —ignore-space-change

• —ignore-whitespace
• —whitespace=
• -C
• -p
• —directory=
• —exclude=
• —include=
• —reject

• These flags are passed to the git apply (see git-apply[1])program that appliesthe patch.

• —patch-format

• By default the command will try to detect the patch formatautomatically. This option allows the user to bypass the automaticdetection and specify the patch format that the patch(es) should beinterpreted as. Valid formats are mbox, mboxrd,stgit, stgit-series and hg.

• -i

• —interactive

• Run interactively.

• —committer-date-is-author-date

• By default the command records the date from the e-mailmessage as the commit author date, and uses the time ofcommit creation as the committer date. This allows theuser to lie about the committer date by using the samevalue as the author date.

• —ignore-date

• By default the command records the date from the e-mailmessage as the commit author date, and uses the time ofcommit creation as the committer date. This allows theuser to lie about the author date by using the samevalue as the committer date.

• —skip

• Skip the current patch. This is only meaningful whenrestarting an aborted patch.

• -S[]

• —gpg-sign[=]

• GPG-sign commits. The keyid argument is optional anddefaults to the committer identity; if specified, it must bestuck to the option without a space.

• —continue

• -r
• —resolved

• After a patch failure (e.g. attempting to applyconflicting patch), the user has applied it by hand andthe index file stores the result of the application.Make a commit using the authorship and commit logextracted from the e-mail message and the current indexfile, and continue.

• —resolvemsg=

• When a patch failure occurs, will be printedto the screen before exiting. This overrides thestandard message informing you to use —continueor —skip to handle the failure. This is solelyfor internal use between git rebase and git am.

• —abort

• Restore the original branch and abort the patching operation.

• —quit

• Abort the patching operation but keep HEAD and the indexuntouched.

• —show-current-patch

• Show the patch being applied when "git am" is stopped becauseof conflicts.

DISCUSSION

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

"From: " and "Subject: " lines starting the body override the respectivecommit 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 towhere the patch begins. Excess whitespace at the end of eachline is automatically stripped.

The patch is expected to be inline, directly following themessage. 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 messageis terminated before the first occurrence of such a line.

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

• skip the current patch by re-running the command with the —skipoption.

• hand resolve the conflict in the working directory, and updatethe index file to bring it into a state that the patch shouldhave produced. Then run the command with the —continue option.

The command refuses to process new mailboxes until the currentoperation is finished, so if you decide to start over from scratch,run git am —abort before running the command with mailboxnames.

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

HOOKS

This command can run applypatch-msg, pre-applypatch,and post-applypatch hooks. See githooks[5] for moreinformation.

SEE ALSO

git-apply[1].

GIT

Part of the git[1] suite