I came across this when I was mistakenly thinking I could use "--quiet" to stop the output of git format-patch giving the 0001-somecommit.patch names as it generated them. It was then when I read the man page and found it is passed into git diff and is supposed to disable all output. The interesting thing, is that it only seems to do this on every other commit it format-patches, as shown below. I'm assuming this is a bug, since I can't imagine what use case would have every alternate patch being output as useful. If I get a chance, I'll take a look at the code and see if I can figure out what is going on, but I figured I'd mention it 1st in case it triggered an "Oh yeah it is XYZ" in someones memory. Paul. --- Script started on Mon 11 Apr 2011 04:50:22 PM EDT paul@dv2000:~/git/git$ git --version git version 1.7.4.4 paul@dv2000:~/git/git$ git format-patch --quiet -o foo HEAD~10..HEAD paul@dv2000:~/git/git$ ls -l foo total 60 -rw-r--r-- 1 paul paul 2960 2011-04-11 16:50 0001-fetch-pull-recurse-into-submodules-when-necessary.patch -rw-r--r-- 1 paul paul 0 2011-04-11 16:50 0002-fetch-pull-Add-the-on-demand-value-to-the-recurse-su.patch -rw-r--r-- 1 paul paul 1514 2011-04-11 16:50 0003-config-teach-the-fetch.recurseSubmodules-option-the-.patch -rw-r--r-- 1 paul paul 0 2011-04-11 16:50 0004-Submodules-Add-on-demand-value-for-the-fetchRecurseS.patch -rw-r--r-- 1 paul paul 1391 2011-04-11 16:50 0005-fetch-pull-Don-t-recurse-into-a-submodule-when-commi.patch -rw-r--r-- 1 paul paul 0 2011-04-11 16:50 0006-submodule-update-Don-t-fetch-when-the-submodule-comm.patch -rw-r--r-- 1 paul paul 1381 2011-04-11 16:50 0007-fetch-pull-Describe-recurse-submodule-restrictions-i.patch -rw-r--r-- 1 paul paul 0 2011-04-11 16:50 0008-remote-disallow-some-nonsensical-option-combinations.patch -rw-r--r-- 1 paul paul 3801 2011-04-11 16:50 0009-remote-separate-the-concept-of-push-and-fetch-mirror.patch -rw-r--r-- 1 paul paul 0 2011-04-11 16:50 0010-remote-deprecate-mirror.patch -rw-r--r-- 1 paul paul 3172 2011-04-11 16:50 0011-submodule-process-conflicting-submodules-only-once.patch -rw-r--r-- 1 paul paul 0 2011-04-11 16:50 0012-revisions.txt-consistent-use-of-quotes.patch -rw-r--r-- 1 paul paul 9679 2011-04-11 16:50 0013-revisions.txt-structure-with-a-labelled-list.patch -rw-r--r-- 1 paul paul 0 2011-04-11 16:50 0014-log-cherry-pick-documentation-regression-fix.patch -rw-r--r-- 1 paul paul 1826 2011-04-11 16:50 0015-compat-add-missing-include-sys-resource.h.patch -rw-r--r-- 1 paul paul 0 2011-04-11 16:50 0016-pull-do-not-clobber-untracked-files-on-initial-pull.patch -rw-r--r-- 1 paul paul 1743 2011-04-11 16:50 0017-Start-preparing-for-1.7.4.4.patch -rw-r--r-- 1 paul paul 0 2011-04-11 16:50 0018-gitweb-Fix-parsing-of-negative-fractional-timezones-.patch -rw-r--r-- 1 paul paul 1089 2011-04-11 16:50 0019-Documentation-trivial-grammar-fix-in-core.worktree-d.patch -rw-r--r-- 1 paul paul 0 2011-04-11 16:50 0020-revisions.txt-language-improvements.patch -rw-r--r-- 1 paul paul 1114 2011-04-11 16:50 0021-Git-1.7.4.4.patch -rw-r--r-- 1 paul paul 0 2011-04-11 16:50 0022-Git-1.7.5-rc1.patch -rw-r--r-- 1 paul paul 4996 2011-04-11 16:50 0023-git-p4-replace-each-tab-with-8-spaces-for-consistenc.patch paul@dv2000:~/git/git$ exit exit Script done on Mon 11 Apr 2011 04:51:34 PM EDT -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html