---
name: "git-applymbox"
section: "1"
platform: "linux"
package: "git-core"
version: "1:1.4.4.4-4+etch4"
release: "Debian 4.0 (Etch)"
platforms: ["linux"]
url: "https://new.carta.tech/git-applymbox"
---

# git-applymbox(1)

Apply a series of patches in a mailbox

## NAME

git-applymbox - Apply a series of patches in a mailbox

## SYNOPSIS

*git-applymbox* \[-u\] \[-k\] \[-q\] \[-m\] ( -c .dotest/\<num\> \| \<mbox\> ) \[ \<signoff\> \]

## DESCRIPTION

Splits mail messages in a mailbox into commit log message, authorship information and patches, and applies them to the current branch.

## OPTIONS

- \-q

  Apply patches interactively. The user will be given opportunity to edit the log message and the patch before attempting to apply it.

- \-k

  Usually the program *cleans up* the Subject: header line to extract the title line for the commit log message, among which (1) remove *Re:* or *re:*, (2) leading whitespaces, (3) *\[* up to *\]*, typically *\[PATCH\]*, and then prepends "\[PATCH\] ". This flag forbids this munging, and is most useful when used to read back *git format-patch --mbox* output.

- \-m

  Patches are applied with git-apply command, and unless it cleanly applies without fuzz, the processing fails. With this flag, if a tree that the patch applies cleanly is found in a repository, the patch is applied to the tree and then a 3-way merge between the resulting tree and the current tree.

- \-u

  By default, the commit log message, author name and author email are taken from the e-mail without any charset conversion, after minimally decoding MIME transfer encoding. This flag causes the resulting commit to be encoded in utf-8 by transliterating them. Note that the patch is always used as is without charset conversion, even with this flag.

- \-c .dotest/\<num\>

  When the patch contained in an e-mail does not cleanly apply, the command exits with an error message. The patch and extracted message are found in .dotest/, and you could re-run *git applymbox* with *-c .dotest/\<num\>* flag to restart the process after inspecting and fixing them.

\<mbox\>

The name of the file that contains the e-mail messages with patches. This file should be in the UNIX mailbox format. See *SubmittingPatches* document to learn about the formatting convention for e-mail submission.

\<signoff\>

The name of the file that contains your "Signed-off-by" line. See *SubmittingPatches* document to learn what "Signed-off-by" line means. You can also just say *yes*, *true*, *me*, or *please* to use an automatically generated "Signed-off-by" line based on your committer identity.

## SEE ALSO

[**git-am**(1)](/git-am/1.md), [**git-applypatch**(1)](/git-applypatch/1.md).

## AUTHOR

Written by Linus Torvalds \<torvalds@osdl.org\>

## DOCUMENTATION

Documentation by Junio C Hamano and the git-list \<git@vger.kernel.org\>.

## GIT

Part of the [**git**(7)](/git/7.md) suite