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GIT-AM(1) Git Manual GIT-AM(1)

NAME

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

SYNOPSIS

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)

DESCRIPTION

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.

OPTIONS

(<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 as a trailer (see git-interpret-trailers(1)). 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.

DISCUSSION

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).

CAVEATS

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.

HOOKS

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.

CONFIGURATION

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.

SEE ALSO

git-apply(1), git-format-patch(1).

GIT

Part of the git(1) suite

03/01/2026 Git 2.53.0.697.g625c4f