1git-pack-objects(1) 2=================== 3 4NAME 5---- 6git-pack-objects - Create a packed archive of objects. 7 8 9SYNOPSIS 10-------- 11[verse] 12'git-pack-objects' [-q] [--no-reuse-delta] [--non-empty] 13 [--local] [--incremental] [--window=N] [--depth=N] 14 {--stdout | base-name} < object-list 15 16 17DESCRIPTION 18----------- 19Reads list of objects from the standard input, and writes a packed 20archive with specified base-name, or to the standard output. 21 22A packed archive is an efficient way to transfer set of objects 23between two repositories, and also is an archival format which 24is efficient to access. The packed archive format (.pack) is 25designed to be unpackable without having anything else, but for 26random access, accompanied with the pack index file (.idx). 27 28'git-unpack-objects' command can read the packed archive and 29expand the objects contained in the pack into "one-file 30one-object" format; this is typically done by the smart-pull 31commands when a pack is created on-the-fly for efficient network 32transport by their peers. 33 34Placing both in the pack/ subdirectory of $GIT_OBJECT_DIRECTORY (or 35any of the directories on $GIT_ALTERNATE_OBJECT_DIRECTORIES) 36enables git to read from such an archive. 37 38In a packed archive, an object is either stored as a compressed 39whole, or as a difference from some other object. The latter is 40often called a delta. 41 42 43OPTIONS 44------- 45base-name:: 46 Write into a pair of files (.pack and .idx), using 47 <base-name> to determine the name of the created file. 48 When this option is used, the two files are written in 49 <base-name>-<SHA1>.{pack,idx} files. <SHA1> is a hash 50 of object names (currently in random order so it does 51 not have any useful meaning) to make the resulting 52 filename reasonably unique, and written to the standard 53 output of the command. 54 55--stdout:: 56 Write the pack contents (what would have been written to 57 .pack file) out to the standard output. 58 59--window and --depth:: 60 These two options affects how the objects contained in 61 the pack are stored using delta compression. The 62 objects are first internally sorted by type, size and 63 optionally names and compared against the other objects 64 within --window to see if using delta compression saves 65 space. --depth limits the maximum delta depth; making 66 it too deep affects the performance on the unpacker 67 side, because delta data needs to be applied that many 68 times to get to the necessary object. 69 70--incremental:: 71 This flag causes an object already in a pack ignored 72 even if it appears in the standard input. 73 74--local:: 75 This flag is similar to `--incremental`; instead of 76 ignoring all packed objects, it only ignores objects 77 that are packed and not in the local object store 78 (i.e. borrowed from an alternate). 79 80--non-empty:: 81 Only create a packed archive if it would contain at 82 least one object. 83 84-q:: 85 This flag makes the command not to report its progress 86 on the standard error stream. 87 88--no-reuse-delta:: 89 When creating a packed archive in a repository that 90 has existing packs, the command reuses existing deltas. 91 This sometimes results in a slightly suboptimal pack. 92 This flag tells the command not to reuse existing deltas 93 but compute them from scratch. 94 95 96Author 97------ 98Written by Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> 99 100Documentation 101------------- 102Documentation by Junio C Hamano 103 104See-Also 105-------- 106gitlink:git-repack[1] 107gitlink:git-prune-packed[1] 108 109GIT 110--- 111Part of the gitlink:git[7] suite 112