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HTML rendering created 2026-05-24 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | DISCUSSION | CAVEATS | HOOKS | CONFIGURATION | SEE ALSO | GIT | COLOPHON |
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GIT-AM(1) Git Manual GIT-AM(1)
git-am - Apply a series of patches from a mailbox
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)
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.
(<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 to the commit message. 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
git-apply(1), git-format-patch(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 2026-05-24. (At that time,
the date of the most recent commit that was found in the
repository was 2026-05-22.) 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 2.54.0.254.g6a4418 2026-05-22 GIT-AM(1)
Pages that refer to this page: git(1), git-am(1), git-apply(1), git-cherry(1), git-config(1), git-format-patch(1), git-mailinfo(1), git-send-email(1), gitweb(1), githooks(5), giteveryday(7), gittutorial(7), gitworkflows(7)
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HTML rendering created 2026-05-24 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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