git commit - setting timestamps into the future

Question

Hi,

I need to make some commits using Git but I would like the timestamp in git-log to be in the future.

How can I do a commit in git that causes a future timestamp to register in the git-log?

Thanks

Git-noob

Answer 1

I can't imagine this is a normal use-case. One way to do it would be to temporarily set the time on your local computer to a future date and perform the commit, but that is disruptive and may cause problems with other tools that read the repository and unexpectedly see a future date in a commit.

You may want to reevaluate the reasons that you need to do this.

Answer 2

Did you try changing your clock? =)

I'd think that should work locally, but not sure what'd happen when others go to merge.

Answer 3

May I ask why you would want to do this?

If you don't want to change your clock, I would suggest creating a script to do the commit and use the Windows Scheduler (or whatever equivalent for your OS) to run the script at the time you want the commit to be.

Answer 4

You should wait a bit.

Or you can do this:

/tmp/x 604% env GIT_AUTHOR_DATE='Wed Dec 19 15:14:05 2029 -0800' git commit -m 'future!'
[master]: created 6348548: "Future!"
 1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

/tmp/x 605% git log 

Author: Dustin Sallings <[email protected]>
Date:   Wed Dec 19 15:14:05 2029 -0800

    Future!

Note that there's both an author date and a committer date, so be sure to set the right one (or both).

Answer 5

If you want to retain an actual change-date when adding a project to git, you can do so with

env GIT_AUTHOR_DATE="`ls -rt *.cpp|tail -1|xargs date -u -r`" git commit -m "Old sources retaining old change-dates of last changed
 file: `ls -rt *.cpp|tail -1`, actual commit date: `date`"

This will commit with the change-date of the last-changed *.cpp-file, and a nice explaining message of the actual commit date.