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GIT-COMMIT-TREE(1)                           Git Manual                           GIT-COMMIT-TREE(1)



NAME
       git-commit-tree - Create a new commit object

SYNOPSIS
       git commit-tree <tree> [(-p <parent>)...]
       git commit-tree [(-p <parent>)...] [-S[<keyid>]] [(-m <message>)...]
                         [(-F <file>)...] <tree>


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
       <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.

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 <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 email 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 issues 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
           its 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 2.34.1                                   02/26/2026                           GIT-COMMIT-TREE(1)