Documentation / git-pack-objects.txton commit Merge git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/gitk/gitk (90768da)
   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' [--non-empty] [--local] [--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 written 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--local::
  68        This flag is similar to `--incremental`; instead of
  69        ignoring all packed objects, it only ignores objects
  70        that are packed and not in the local object store
  71        (i.e. borrowed from an alternate).
  72
  73--non-empty::
  74        Only create a packed archive if it would contain at
  75        least one object.
  76
  77Author
  78------
  79Written by Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
  80
  81Documentation
  82-------------
  83Documentation by Junio C Hamano
  84
  85See-Also
  86--------
  87gitlink:git-repack[1]
  88gitlink:git-prune-packed[1]
  89
  90GIT
  91---
  92Part of the gitlink:git[7] suite
  93