git-pack-objects - Create a packed archive of objects.

git-pack-objects [--non-empty] [--local] [--incremental] [--window=N] [--depth=N] {--stdout | base-name} < object-list

Reads list of objects from the standard input, and writes a packed archive with specified base-name, or to the standard output.

A packed archive is an efficient way to transfer set of objects between two repositories, and also is an archival format which is efficient to access. The packed archive format (.pack) is designed to be unpackable without having anything else, but for random access, accompanied with the pack index file (.idx).

git-unpack-objects command can read the packed archive and expand the objects contained in the pack into "one-file one-object" format; this is typically done by the smart-pull commands when a pack is created on-the-fly for efficient network transport by their peers.

Placing both in the pack/ subdirectory of $GIT_OBJECT_DIRECTORY (or any of the directories on $GIT_ALTERNATE_OBJECT_DIRECTORIES) enables git to read from such an archive.

base-name

Write into a pair of files (.pack and .idx), using <base-name> to determine the name of the created file. When this option is used, the two files are written in <base-name>-<SHA1>.{pack,idx} files. <SHA1> is a hash of object names (currently in random order so it does not have any useful meaning) to make the resulting filename reasonably unique, and written to the standard output of the command.

--stdout

Write the pack contents (what would have been written to .pack file) out to the standard output.

--window and --depth

These two options affects how the objects contained in the pack are stored using delta compression. The objects are first internally sorted by type, size and optionally names and compared against the other objects within --window to see if using delta compression saves space. --depth limits the maximum delta depth; making it too deep affects the performance on the unpacker side, because delta data needs to be applied that many times to get to the necessary object.

--incremental

This flag causes an object already in a pack ignored even if it appears in the standard input.

--local

This flag is similar to --incremental; instead of ignoring all packed objects, it only ignores objects that are packed and not in the local object store (i.e. borrowed from an alternate).

--non-empty

Only create a packed archive if it would contain at least one object.

Written by Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

Documentation by Junio C Hamano

git-repack(1) git-prune-packed(1)

Part of the git(7) suite