GIT commit as different user without email / or only email
I'm trying to commit some changes as a different user, but i do not have a valid email address, following command is not working for me:
git commit --author="john doe" -m "some fix"
fatal: No existing author found with 'john doe'
I have the same problem when trying to commit with only an email address
git commit --author="[email protected]" -m "some fix"
fatal: No existing author found with '[email protected]'
On the GIT man pages for the commit command it says i can use the
standard A U Thor <[email protected]> format
For the --author option.
Where is this format defined ? what does A and U stand for ? how do i commit for a different user with only a username or only an email?
The minimal required author format, as hinted to in this SO answer, is
Name <email>
In your case, this means you want to write
git commit --author="Name <email>" -m "whatever"
Per Willem D'Haeseleer's comment, if you don't have an email address, you can use <>:
git commit --author="Name <>" -m "whatever"
As written on the git commit man page that you linked to, if you supply anything less than that, it's used as a search token to search through previous commits, looking for other commits by that author.
The specific format is:
git commit --author="John Doe <[email protected]>" -m "Impersonation is evil."
The
standard A U Thor <[email protected]> format
Seems to be defined as followed: ( as far as i know, with absolutely no warranty )
A U Thor = required username
- The separation of the characters probably indicates that spaces are allowed, it could also be resembling initials.
- The username has to be followed by 1 space, extra spaces will be truncated
<[email protected]> = optional email address
- Must always be between < > signs.
- The email address format isn't validated, you can pretty much enter whatever you want
- Optional, you can omit this explicitly by using <>
If you don't use this exact syntax, git will search through the existing commits and use the first commit that contains your provided string.
Examples:
-
Only user name
Omit the email address explicitly:
git commit --author="John Doe <>" -m "Impersonation is evil." -
Only email
Technically this isn't possible. You can however enter the email address as the username and explicitly omit the email address. This doesn't seem like it's very useful. I think it would make even more sense to extract the user name from the email address and then use that as the username. But if you have to:
git commit --author="[email protected] <>" -m "Impersonation is evil."
I ran in to this when trying to convert a repository from mercurial to git. I tested the commands on msysgit 1.7.10.
The --author option doesn't do the right thing for the purpose of not leaking information between your git personalities: It doesn't bypass reading the invoking user's configuration:
*** Please tell me who you are.
Run
git config --global user.email "[email protected]"
git config --global user.name "Your Name"
This does:
git -c user.name='A U Thor' -c [email protected] commit
For the purpose of separating work- and private git personalities, Git 2.13 supports directory specific configuration: You no longer need to wrap git and hack this yourself to get that.
Just supplement：
git commit --author="[email protected] " -m "Impersonation is evil."
In some cases the commit still fails and shows you the following message:
*** Please tell me who you are.
Run
git config --global user.email "[email protected]" git config --global user.name "Your Name"
to set your account's default identity. Omit --global to set the identity only in this repository.
fatal: unable to auto-detect email address (got xxxx)
So just run "git config", then "git commit"