Documentation / git-fast-export.txton commit Update draft release notes to 1.7.6 (791a765)
   1git-fast-export(1)
   2==================
   3
   4NAME
   5----
   6git-fast-export - Git data exporter
   7
   8
   9SYNOPSIS
  10--------
  11'git fast-export [options]' | 'git fast-import'
  12
  13DESCRIPTION
  14-----------
  15This program dumps the given revisions in a form suitable to be piped
  16into 'git fast-import'.
  17
  18You can use it as a human-readable bundle replacement (see
  19linkgit:git-bundle[1]), or as a kind of an interactive
  20'git filter-branch'.
  21
  22
  23OPTIONS
  24-------
  25--progress=<n>::
  26        Insert 'progress' statements every <n> objects, to be shown by
  27        'git fast-import' during import.
  28
  29--signed-tags=(verbatim|warn|strip|abort)::
  30        Specify how to handle signed tags.  Since any transformation
  31        after the export can change the tag names (which can also happen
  32        when excluding revisions) the signatures will not match.
  33+
  34When asking to 'abort' (which is the default), this program will die
  35when encountering a signed tag.  With 'strip', the tags will be made
  36unsigned, with 'verbatim', they will be silently exported
  37and with 'warn', they will be exported, but you will see a warning.
  38
  39--tag-of-filtered-object=(abort|drop|rewrite)::
  40        Specify how to handle tags whose tagged object is filtered out.
  41        Since revisions and files to export can be limited by path,
  42        tagged objects may be filtered completely.
  43+
  44When asking to 'abort' (which is the default), this program will die
  45when encountering such a tag.  With 'drop' it will omit such tags from
  46the output.  With 'rewrite', if the tagged object is a commit, it will
  47rewrite the tag to tag an ancestor commit (via parent rewriting; see
  48linkgit:git-rev-list[1])
  49
  50-M::
  51-C::
  52        Perform move and/or copy detection, as described in the
  53        linkgit:git-diff[1] manual page, and use it to generate
  54        rename and copy commands in the output dump.
  55+
  56Note that earlier versions of this command did not complain and
  57produced incorrect results if you gave these options.
  58
  59--export-marks=<file>::
  60        Dumps the internal marks table to <file> when complete.
  61        Marks are written one per line as `:markid SHA-1`. Only marks
  62        for revisions are dumped; marks for blobs are ignored.
  63        Backends can use this file to validate imports after they
  64        have been completed, or to save the marks table across
  65        incremental runs.  As <file> is only opened and truncated
  66        at completion, the same path can also be safely given to
  67        \--import-marks.
  68
  69--import-marks=<file>::
  70        Before processing any input, load the marks specified in
  71        <file>.  The input file must exist, must be readable, and
  72        must use the same format as produced by \--export-marks.
  73+
  74Any commits that have already been marked will not be exported again.
  75If the backend uses a similar \--import-marks file, this allows for
  76incremental bidirectional exporting of the repository by keeping the
  77marks the same across runs.
  78
  79--fake-missing-tagger::
  80        Some old repositories have tags without a tagger.  The
  81        fast-import protocol was pretty strict about that, and did not
  82        allow that.  So fake a tagger to be able to fast-import the
  83        output.
  84
  85--no-data::
  86        Skip output of blob objects and instead refer to blobs via
  87        their original SHA-1 hash.  This is useful when rewriting the
  88        directory structure or history of a repository without
  89        touching the contents of individual files.  Note that the
  90        resulting stream can only be used by a repository which
  91        already contains the necessary objects.
  92
  93--full-tree::
  94        This option will cause fast-export to issue a "deleteall"
  95        directive for each commit followed by a full list of all files
  96        in the commit (as opposed to just listing the files which are
  97        different from the commit's first parent).
  98
  99[<git-rev-list-args>...]::
 100       A list of arguments, acceptable to 'git rev-parse' and
 101       'git rev-list', that specifies the specific objects and references
 102       to export.  For example, `master{tilde}10..master` causes the
 103       current master reference to be exported along with all objects
 104       added since its 10th ancestor commit.
 105
 106EXAMPLES
 107--------
 108
 109-------------------------------------------------------------------
 110$ git fast-export --all | (cd /empty/repository && git fast-import)
 111-------------------------------------------------------------------
 112
 113This will export the whole repository and import it into the existing
 114empty repository.  Except for reencoding commits that are not in
 115UTF-8, it would be a one-to-one mirror.
 116
 117-----------------------------------------------------
 118$ git fast-export master~5..master |
 119        sed "s|refs/heads/master|refs/heads/other|" |
 120        git fast-import
 121-----------------------------------------------------
 122
 123This makes a new branch called 'other' from 'master~5..master'
 124(i.e. if 'master' has linear history, it will take the last 5 commits).
 125
 126Note that this assumes that none of the blobs and commit messages
 127referenced by that revision range contains the string
 128'refs/heads/master'.
 129
 130
 131Limitations
 132-----------
 133
 134Since 'git fast-import' cannot tag trees, you will not be
 135able to export the linux-2.6.git repository completely, as it contains
 136a tag referencing a tree instead of a commit.
 137
 138GIT
 139---
 140Part of the linkgit:git[1] suite