How do you squash commits into one patch with git format-patch?

Question

I\'ve got eight commits on a branch that I\'d like to email to some people who aren\'t git enlightened, yet. So far, everything I do either gives me 8 patch files, or start

Answer 1

I'd recommend doing this on a throwaway branch as follows. If your commits are in the "newlines" branch and you have switched back to your "master" branch already, this should do the trick:

[adam@mbp2600 example (master)]$ git checkout -b tmpsquash
Switched to a new branch "tmpsquash"

[adam@mbp2600 example (tmpsquash)]$ git merge --squash newlines
Updating 4d2de39..b6768b2
Fast forward
Squash commit -- not updating HEAD
 test.txt |    2 ++
 1 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

[adam@mbp2600 example (tmpsquash)]$ git commit -a -m "My squashed commits"
[tmpsquash]: created 75b0a89: "My squashed commits"
 1 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

[adam@mbp2600 example (tmpsquash)]$ git format-patch master
0001-My-squashed-commits.patch

Hope this helps!