1git-pack-objects(1) 2=================== 3 4NAME 5---- 6git-pack-objects - Create a packed archive of objects. 7 8 9SYNOPSIS 10-------- 11'git-pack-objects' [--incremental] [--window=N] [--depth=N] {--stdout | base-name} < object-list 12 13 14DESCRIPTION 15----------- 16Reads list of objects from the standard input, and writes a packed 17archive with specified base-name, or to the standard output. 18 19A packed archive is an efficient way to transfer set of objects 20between two repositories, and also is an archival format which 21is efficient to access. The packed archive format (.pack) is 22designed to be unpackable without having anything else, but for 23random access, accompanied with the pack index file (.idx). 24 25'git-unpack-objects' command can read the packed archive and 26expand the objects contained in the pack into "one-file 27one-object" format; this is typically done by the smart-pull 28commands when a pack is created on-the-fly for efficient network 29transport by their peers. 30 31Placing both in the pack/ subdirectory of $GIT_OBJECT_DIRECTORY (or 32any of the directories on $GIT_ALTERNATE_OBJECT_DIRECTORIES) 33enables git to read from such an archive. 34 35 36OPTIONS 37------- 38base-name:: 39 Write into a pair of files (.pack and .idx), using 40 <base-name> to determine the name of the created file. 41 When this option is used, the two files are written in 42 <base-name>-<SHA1>.{pack,idx} files. <SHA1> is a hash 43 of object names (currently in random order so it does 44 not have any useful meaning) to make the resulting 45 filename reasonably unique, and written to the standard 46 output of the command. 47 48--stdout:: 49 Write the pack contents (what would have been writtin to 50 .pack file) out to the standard output. 51 52--window and --depth:: 53 These two options affects how the objects contained in 54 the pack are stored using delta compression. The 55 objects are first internally sorted by type, size and 56 optionally names and compared against the other objects 57 within --window to see if using delta compression saves 58 space. --depth limits the maximum delta depth; making 59 it too deep affects the performance on the unpacker 60 side, because delta data needs to be applied that many 61 times to get to the necessary object. 62 63--incremental:: 64 This flag causes an object already in a pack ignored 65 even if it appears in the standard input. 66 67 68Author 69------ 70Written by Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> 71 72Documentation 73------------- 74Documentation by Junio C Hamano 75 76See-Also 77-------- 78gitlink:git-repack[1] 79gitlink:git-prune-packed[1] 80 81GIT 82--- 83Part of the gitlink:git[7] suite 84