Andrew's git / gitweb.git /
ae6e88d433981659053911069070befb85e96ed0
   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 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
  77GIT
  78---
  79Part of the link:git.html[git] suite
  80