git-mailinfo - Man Page

• Extract the patch and author data from an email message: git mailinfo message|patch
• Extract but remove leading and trailing whitespace: git mailinfo -k message|patch
• Remove everything from the body before a scissors line (e.g. "-->* --") and retrieve the message or patch: git mailinfo --scissors message|patch

tldr.sh

git mailinfo [-k|-b] [-u | --encoding=<encoding> | -n]
               [--[no-]scissors] [--quoted-cr=<action>]
               <msg> <patch>

Reads a single e-mail message from the standard input, and writes the commit log message in <msg> file, and the patches in <patch> file​. The author name, e-mail and e-mail subject are written out to the standard output to be used by git am to create a commit​. It is usually not necessary to use this command directly​. See git-am(1) instead​.

-k

Usually the program removes email cruft from the Subject: header line to extract the title line for the commit log message​. This option prevents this munging, and is most useful when used to read back git format-patch -k output​.

Specifically, the following are removed until none of them remain:

• Leading and trailing whitespace​.
• Leading Re:, re:, and :​.
• Leading bracketed strings (between [ and ], usually [PATCH])​.

Finally, runs of whitespace are normalized to a single ASCII space character​.

-b

When -k is not in effect, all leading strings bracketed with [ and ] pairs are stripped​. This option limits the stripping to only the pairs whose bracketed string contains the word "PATCH"​.

-u

The commit log message, author name and author email are taken from the e-mail, and after minimally decoding MIME transfer encoding, re-coded in the charset specified by i18n​.commitEncoding (defaulting to UTF-8) by transliterating them​. This used to be optional but now it is the default​.

Note that the patch is always used as-is without charset conversion, even with this flag​.

--encoding=<encoding>

Similar to -u​. But when re-coding, the charset specified here is used instead of the one specified by i18n​.commitEncoding or UTF-8​.

-n

Disable all charset re-coding of the metadata​.

-m,  --message-id

Copy the Message-ID header at the end of the commit message​. This is useful in order to associate commits with mailing list discussions​.

--scissors

Remove everything in body before a scissors line (e​.g​. "-- >8 --")​. The line represents scissors and perforation marks, and is used to request the reader to cut the message at that line​. If that line appears in the body of the message before the patch, everything before it (including the scissors line itself) is ignored when this option is used​.

This is useful if you want to begin your message in a discussion thread with comments and suggestions on the message you are responding to, and to conclude it with a patch submission, separating the discussion and the beginning of the proposed commit log message with a scissors line​.

This can be enabled by default with the configuration option mailinfo​.scissors​.

--no-scissors

Ignore scissors lines​. Useful for overriding mailinfo​.scissors settings​.

--quoted-cr=<action>

Action when processes email messages sent with base64 or quoted-printable encoding, and the decoded lines end with a CRLF instead of a simple LF​.

The valid actions are:

• nowarn: Git will do nothing when such a CRLF is found​.
• warn: Git will issue a warning for each message if such a CRLF is found​.
• strip: Git will convert those CRLF to LF​.

The default action could be set by configuration option mailinfo​.quotedCR​. If no such configuration option has been set, warn will be used​.

<msg>

The commit log message extracted from e-mail, usually except the title line which comes from e-mail Subject​.

<patch>

The patch extracted from e-mail​.

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:

mailinfo​.scissors

If true, makes git-mailinfo(1) (and therefore git-am(1)) act by default as if the --scissors option was provided on the command-line​. When active, this feature removes everything from the message body before a scissors line (i​.e​. consisting mainly of ">8", "8<" and "-")​.

Part of the git(1) suite