GIT-CHECK-MAILMAP(1)

💌 GIT-CHECK-MAILMAP(1) — the git manual, but make it group chat

okay so bestie, welcome to GIT-CHECK-MAILMAP(1), straight out of the Git Manual. this one's a little cutie: it's the command that tells you somebody's actual canonical name and email instead of whatever chaotic string they typed that one time. let's get into it ✨

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🎀 NAME

git-check-mailmap — show canonical names and email addresses of contacts 💖

like, the whole vibe is: you give it a contact, it gives you back the real, official, canonically-correct version. no cap.

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🦋 SYNOPSIS

git check-mailmap [<options>] <contact>...

that's it. that's the whole thing. slay.

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🌸 DESCRIPTION

for each "Name <user@host>", "<user@host>", or "user@host" that you hand it — either from the command line, or from standard input (that's the --stdin situation) — it looks up that person's canonical name and email address (peep "Mapping Authors" below, iykyk). found it? prints it 💅. didn't find it? prints your input exactly as-is, no judgement, no drama. 🫶

so basically: three flavors of contact string, and it wraps them all up and gives them their main character canonical identity.

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

• --stdin — reads contacts from the standard input, one per line, and it does this after it's exhausted all the contacts you already gave it on the command line. so command-line contacts go first, then it opens up stdin for the rest. 🍓
• --mailmap-file=<file> — on top of any mailmap files that are already configured, read this specific mailmap file too. and here's the tea: entries in this file take precedence over entries in either the default mailmap file or any configured mailmap file. so it wins. it's the main character of mailmap files. 👑
• --mailmap-blob=<blob> — like --mailmap-file, except it treats the value as a reference to a blob in the repository instead of a file on disk. and if you specify both --mailmap-file and --mailmap-blob, then the entries in --mailmap-file will take precedence. 🌈

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💜 OUTPUT

for each contact, you get a single line out, terminated by a newline. periodt. 💀

• if the name is provided, or it's known to the mailmap → it prints "Name <user@host>"
• otherwise → it prints only "<user@host>"

that's the whole output contract. clean, minimal, iconic.

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⭐ CONFIGURATION

wanna specify a custom .mailmap target file or object? go check out mailmap.file and mailmap.blob in git-config(1) — they'll tell you exactly how. 🔥

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🧚 MAPPING AUTHORS

see gitmailmap(5). that's where the actual mapping sorcery lives, bestie. go look. 💖

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🐚 GIT

part of the git(1) suite 🎀

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ngl, this one's short and sweet and honestly kind of underrated. go make your commit history look like it was written by real, correctly-named humans. 💅✨

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✿ thank you for reading, mwah ✿ this lil page came from Git 2.56.0, dated 2026-09-27. now go fix somebody's name in your git log 🌸🦋💖