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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | COMMIT INFORMATION | DATE FORMATS | DISCUSSION | FILES | SEE ALSO | GIT | COLOPHON |
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GIT-COMMIT-TREE(1) Git Manual GIT-COMMIT-TREE(1)
git-commit-tree - Create a new commit object
git commit-tree <tree> [(-p <parent>)...]
git commit-tree [(-p <parent>)...] [-S[<keyid>]] [(-m <message>)...]
[(-F <file>)...] <tree>
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.
<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.
A commit encapsulates:
• all parent object ids
• author name, email and date
• 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.
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.
Git is to some extent character encoding agnostic.
• The contents of the blob objects are uninterpreted sequences
of bytes. There is no encoding translation at the core level.
• 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.
• 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.
/etc/mailname
git-write-tree(1) git-commit(1)
Part of the git(1) suite
This page is part of the git (Git distributed version control
system) project. Information about the project can be found at
⟨http://git-scm.com/⟩. If you have a bug report for this manual
page, see ⟨http://git-scm.com/community⟩. This page was obtained
from the project's upstream Git repository
⟨https://github.com/git/git.git⟩ on 2025-08-11. (At that time,
the date of the most recent commit that was found in the
repository was 2025-08-07.) If you discover any rendering
problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there is
a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
(which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
man-pages@man7.org
Git 2.51.0.rc1 2025-08-07 GIT-COMMIT-TREE(1)
Pages that refer to this page: git(1), git-commit(1), git-filter-branch(1), git-merge-tree(1), git-var(1)