Manual: git-commit-tree
GIT-COMMIT-TREE(1) Git Manual GIT-COMMIT-TREE(1)
NAME
git-commit-tree - Create a new commit object
SYNOPSIS
git commit-tree [(-p )...]
git commit-tree [(-p )...] [-S[]] [(-m )...]
[(-F )...]
DESCRIPTION
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.
OPTIONS
An existing tree object.
-p
Each -p indicates the id of a parent commit object.
-m
A paragraph in the commit log message. This can be given more than once and each
becomes its own paragraph.
-F
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[], --gpg-sign[=], --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.
COMMIT INFORMATION
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.
DATE FORMATS
The GIT_AUTHOR_DATE and GIT_COMMITTER_DATE environment variables support the following date formats:
Git internal format
It is , where is the number of seconds since
the UNIX epoch. 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.
DISCUSSION
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.
FILES
/etc/mailname
SEE ALSO
git-write-tree(1) git-commit(1)
GIT
Part of the git(1) suite
Git 2.53.0 03/02/2026 GIT-COMMIT-TREE(1)