1git-pack-objects(1) 2=================== 3v0.1, July 2005 4 5NAME 6---- 7git-pack-objects - Create a packed archive of objects. 8 9 10SYNOPSIS 11-------- 12'git-pack-objects' [--incremental] [--window=N] [--depth=N] {--stdout | base-name} < object-list 13 14 15DESCRIPTION 16----------- 17Reads list of objects from the standard input, and writes a packed 18archive with specified base-name, or to the standard output. 19 20A packed archive is an efficient way to transfer set of objects 21between two repositories, and also is an archival format which 22is efficient to access. The packed archive format (.pack) is 23designed to be unpackable without having anything else, but for 24random access, accompanied with the pack index file (.idx). 25 26'git-unpack-objects' command can read the packed archive and 27expand the objects contained in the pack into "one-file 28one-object" format; this is typically done by the smart-pull 29commands when a pack is created on-the-fly for efficient network 30transport by their peers. 31 32Placing both in the pack/ subdirectory of $GIT_OBJECT_DIRECTORY (or 33any of the directories on $GIT_ALTERNATE_OBJECT_DIRECTORIES) 34enables GIT to read from such an archive. 35 36 37OPTIONS 38------- 39base-name:: 40 Write into a pair of files (.pack and .idx), using 41 <base-name> to determine the name of the created file. 42 When this option is used, the two files are written in 43 <base-name>-<SHA1>.{pack,idx} files. <SHA1> is a hash 44 of object names (currently in random order so it does 45 not have any useful meaning) to make the resulting 46 filename reasonably unique, and written to the standard 47 output of the command. 48 49--stdout:: 50 Write the pack contents (what would have been writtin to 51 .pack file) out to the standard output. 52 53--window and --depth:: 54 These two options affects how the objects contained in 55 the pack are stored using delta compression. The 56 objects are first internally sorted by type, size and 57 optionally names and compared against the other objects 58 within --window to see if using delta compression saves 59 space. --depth limits the maximum delta depth; making 60 it too deep affects the performance on the unpacker 61 side, because delta data needs to be applied that many 62 times to get to the necessary object. 63 64--incremental:: 65 This flag causes an object already in a pack ignored 66 even if it appears in the standard input. 67 68 69Author 70------ 71Written by Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> 72 73Documentation 74------------- 75Documentation by Junio C Hamano 76 77See-Also 78-------- 79git-repack-script(1) git-prune-packed(1) 80 81GIT 82--- 83Part of the link:git.html[git] suite 84