git-format-patch(1) Manual Page

Generate plain patches without any diffstats.

Suppress diff output. Useful for commands like git show that show the patch by default, or to cancel the effect of --patch.

Generate diffs with <n> lines of context instead of the usual three.

Spend extra time to make sure the smallest possible diff is produced.

Generate a diff using the "patience diff" algorithm.

Generate a diff using the "histogram diff" algorithm.

Choose a diff algorithm. The variants are as follows:

Generate a diffstat. By default, as much space as necessary will be used for the filename part, and the rest for the graph part. Maximum width defaults to terminal width, or 80 columns if not connected to a terminal, and can be overridden by <width>. The width of the filename part can be limited by giving another width <name-width> after a comma. The width of the graph part can be limited by using --stat-graph-width=<width> (affects all commands generating a stat graph) or by setting diff.statGraphWidth=<width> (does not affect git format-patch). By giving a third parameter <count>, you can limit the output to the first <count> lines, followed by ... if there are more.

Similar to --stat, but shows number of added and deleted lines in decimal notation and pathname without abbreviation, to make it more machine friendly. For binary files, outputs two - instead of saying 0 0.

Output only the last line of the --stat format containing total number of modified files, as well as number of added and deleted lines.

Output the distribution of relative amount of changes for each sub-directory. The behavior of --dirstat can be customized by passing it a comma separated list of parameters. The defaults are controlled by the diff.dirstat configuration variable (see git-config(1)). The following parameters are available:

Output a condensed summary of extended header information such as creations, renames and mode changes.

Turn off rename detection, even when the configuration file gives the default to do so.

Instead of the first handful of characters, show the full pre- and post-image blob object names on the "index" line when generating patch format output.

In addition to --full-index, output a binary diff that can be applied with git-apply.

Instead of showing the full 40-byte hexadecimal object name in diff-raw format output and diff-tree header lines, show only a partial prefix. This is independent of the --full-index option above, which controls the diff-patch output format. Non default number of digits can be specified with --abbrev=<n>.

Break complete rewrite changes into pairs of delete and create. This serves two purposes:

Detect renames. If n is specified, it is a threshold on the similarity index (i.e. amount of addition/deletions compared to the file’s size). For example, -M90% means Git should consider a delete/add pair to be a rename if more than 90% of the file hasn’t changed. Without a % sign, the number is to be read as a fraction, with a decimal point before it. I.e., -M5 becomes 0.5, and is thus the same as -M50%. Similarly, -M05 is the same as -M5%. To limit detection to exact renames, use -M100%. The default similarity index is 50%.

Detect copies as well as renames. See also --find-copies-harder. If n is specified, it has the same meaning as for -M<n>.

For performance reasons, by default, -C option finds copies only if the original file of the copy was modified in the same changeset. This flag makes the command inspect unmodified files as candidates for the source of copy. This is a very expensive operation for large projects, so use it with caution. Giving more than one -C option has the same effect.

Omit the preimage for deletes, i.e. print only the header but not the diff between the preimage and /dev/null. The resulting patch is not meant to be applied with patch or git apply; this is solely for people who want to just concentrate on reviewing the text after the change. In addition, the output obviously lack enough information to apply such a patch in reverse, even manually, hence the name of the option.

The -M and -C options require O(n^2) processing time where n is the number of potential rename/copy targets. This option prevents rename/copy detection from running if the number of rename/copy targets exceeds the specified number.

Output the patch in the order specified in the <orderfile>, which has one shell glob pattern per line. This overrides the diff.orderfile configuration variable (see git-config(1)). To cancel diff.orderfile, use -O/dev/null.

Treat all files as text.

Ignore changes in whitespace at EOL.

Ignore changes in amount of whitespace. This ignores whitespace at line end, and considers all other sequences of one or more whitespace characters to be equivalent.

Ignore whitespace when comparing lines. This ignores differences even if one line has whitespace where the other line has none.

Ignore changes whose lines are all blank.

Show the context between diff hunks, up to the specified number of lines, thereby fusing hunks that are close to each other.

Show whole surrounding functions of changes.

Allow an external diff helper to be executed. If you set an external diff driver with gitattributes(5), you need to use this option with git-log(1) and friends.

Disallow external diff drivers.

Allow (or disallow) external text conversion filters to be run when comparing binary files. See gitattributes(5) for details. Because textconv filters are typically a one-way conversion, the resulting diff is suitable for human consumption, but cannot be applied. For this reason, textconv filters are enabled by default only for git-diff(1) and git-log(1), but not for git-format-patch(1) or diff plumbing commands.

Ignore changes to submodules in the diff generation. <when> can be either "none", "untracked", "dirty" or "all", which is the default. Using "none" will consider the submodule modified when it either contains untracked or modified files or its HEAD differs from the commit recorded in the superproject and can be used to override any settings of the ignore option in git-config(1) or gitmodules(5). When "untracked" is used submodules are not considered dirty when they only contain untracked content (but they are still scanned for modified content). Using "dirty" ignores all changes to the work tree of submodules, only changes to the commits stored in the superproject are shown (this was the behavior until 1.7.0). Using "all" hides all changes to submodules.

Show the given source prefix instead of "a/".

Show the given destination prefix instead of "b/".

Do not show any source or destination prefix.

Prepare patches from the topmost <n> commits.

Use <dir> to store the resulting files, instead of the current working directory.

Name output in [PATCH n/m] format, even with a single patch.

Name output in [PATCH] format.

Start numbering the patches at <n> instead of 1.

Output file names will be a simple number sequence without the default first line of the commit appended.

Do not strip/add [PATCH] from the first line of the commit log message.

Add Signed-off-by: line to the commit message, using the committer identity of yourself.

Print all commits to the standard output in mbox format, instead of creating a file for each one.

Create multipart/mixed attachment, the first part of which is the commit message and the patch itself in the second part, with Content-Disposition: attachment.

Disable the creation of an attachment, overriding the configuration setting.

Create multipart/mixed attachment, the first part of which is the commit message and the patch itself in the second part, with Content-Disposition: inline.

Controls addition of In-Reply-To and References headers to make the second and subsequent mails appear as replies to the first. Also controls generation of the Message-Id header to reference.

Make the first mail (or all the mails with --no-thread) appear as a reply to the given Message-Id, which avoids breaking threads to provide a new patch series.

Do not include a patch that matches a commit in <until>..<since>. This will examine all patches reachable from <since> but not from <until> and compare them with the patches being generated, and any patch that matches is ignored.

Instead of the standard [PATCH] prefix in the subject line, instead use [<Subject-Prefix>]. This allows for useful naming of a patch series, and can be combined with the --numbered option.

Mark the series as the <n>-th iteration of the topic. The output filenames have v<n> pretended to them, and the subject prefix ("PATCH" by default, but configurable via the --subject-prefix option) has ` v<n>` appended to it. E.g. --reroll-count=4 may produce v4-0001-add-makefile.patch file that has "Subject: [PATCH v4 1/20] Add makefile" in it.

Add a To: header to the email headers. This is in addition to any configured headers, and may be used multiple times. The negated form --no-to discards all To: headers added so far (from config or command line).

Add a Cc: header to the email headers. This is in addition to any configured headers, and may be used multiple times. The negated form --no-cc discards all Cc: headers added so far (from config or command line).

Use ident in the From: header of each commit email. If the author ident of the commit is not textually identical to the provided ident, place a From: header in the body of the message with the original author. If no ident is given, use the committer ident.

Add an arbitrary header to the email headers. This is in addition to any configured headers, and may be used multiple times. For example, --add-header="Organization: git-foo". The negated form --no-add-header discards all (To:, Cc:, and custom) headers added so far from config or command line.

In addition to the patches, generate a cover letter file containing the shortlog and the overall diffstat. You can fill in a description in the file before sending it out.

Append the notes (see git-notes(1)) for the commit after the three-dash line.

Add a signature to each message produced. Per RFC 3676 the signature is separated from the body by a line with '-- ' on it. If the signature option is omitted the signature defaults to the Git version number.

Instead of using .patch as the suffix for generated filenames, use specified suffix. A common alternative is --suffix=.txt. Leaving this empty will remove the .patch suffix.

Do not print the names of the generated files to standard output.

Do not output contents of changes in binary files, instead display a notice that those files changed. Patches generated using this option cannot be applied properly, but they are still useful for code review.

Treat the revision argument as a <revision range>, even if it is just a single commit (that would normally be treated as a <since>). Note that root commits included in the specified range are always formatted as creation patches, independently of this flag.