How do I do the reverse of gitk's “Write commit to file”?

Question

I have written a commit to a file from gitk by right-clicking the commit and selecting "Write commit to file".

How do I apply the commit from this file? I can do git apply, git add and git commit combo, but isn't there a one-step command to just take the output (with the commit message and meta-data) and commit it as it is?

Answer 1

I'm using Linux, but I think I see what you're talking about. In gitk there is a "Write commit to file" option when right-clicking a commit, which brings up a dialog that performs the command git diff-tree --stdin -p --pretty by default.

git apply is only for applying diffs, i.e. it won't create the commit object so that shouldn't be used. git am should be the correct tool for performing this operation, as it creates commit objects. However, it doesn't understand the format output by the above command, and creates the error you are seeing.

The easiest option is probably to create the patch using a format git am understands using git format-patch instead of git diff-tree. There may be a way to coerce git am into understanding the git diff-tree format, but I don't do patches much so am not aware of it offhand.

Answer 2

No-one seems to have provided an actual answer to the question, so here's what I found from https://github.com/sinsunsan/archiref_wiki/wiki/Git-howto

patch -p1 < patch-file

This takes the patch file produced by 'Write commit to file', tells it to ignore the first level of path (-p1) i.e. a/, b/ in the file, and apply to the current files on disk. The result is then in your working tree, and can be committed as a new commit:

git commit -am'Commit message here please.'

Answer 3

git am might do what you're looking for. It takes patches as generated by git format-patch as input. I don't know what git-gui is spitting out.

Answer 4

I solved this problem in a tricky way. And in a tricky way I've got it, I gues.

I took my old master branch I worked on some time ago and now decided to carry it commit-by-commit in to my new project. And it seems that back in days I messed around with my file modes between one commit and another.

So after consistently creating theese commit files for move-over by hitting gitks "Write commit to file" I've started to "git apply" commit- files one by one while editing some of them in notepad. Here is a sample of fix that worked for me.

I tweaked such parts

index 30d5c59..63e26fb 100755

to make them look like this

old mode 100644
new mode 100755
index 30d5c59..63e26fb

Hope this would help someone else.