Commit without setting user.email and user.name

Question

I try to commit like this:

git commit --author='Paul Draper <[email protected]>' -m 'My commit message' 

but I get:

*** Please tell me who you are.  Run  git config --global user.email "[email protected]" git config --global user.name "Your Name"  to set your account's default identity. Omit --global to set the identity only in this repository. 

I can set these, but I am on a shared box, and I would have to (want to) unset them afterwards:

git config user.name 'Paul Draper' git config user.email '[email protected]' git commit -m 'My commit message' git config --unset user.name git config --unset user.email 

That's a lot of lines for one commit!

Is there shorter way?

Answer 1

(This occurred to me after suggesting the long version with the environment variables—git commit wants to set both an author and a committer, and --author only overrides the former.)

All git commands take -c arguments before the action verb to set temporary configuration data, so that's the perfect place for this:

git -c user.name='Paul Draper' -c user.email='[email protected]' commit -m '...' 

So in this case -c is part of the git command, not the commit subcommand.