Can a git commit have more than 2 parents?

Question

In this documentation it is mentioned

A commit object may have any number of parents.

But from my understanding, the only case where a commit will have more than 1 parent is when a merge has happened, and in that case there will only be two parents. So my question is, can a commit have more than 2 parents? If so, when?

Answer 1

You can use git merge to merge more than one commit into your current branch. From man git-merge (or git help merge):

git-merge - Join two or more development histories together

The result will be a commit with more than two parents when you do that.

Answer 2

You can specify more than one branch when merging.

For example:

git merge branch_A branch_B branch_C [...]

Then commit has more parents.

Answer 3

Yes, how about 100k parents?

Here is a live GitHub example with a merge of 100k commits: https://github.com/cirosantilli/test-octopus-100k Generated with this script.

Trivia

Linus does not like commits with more than 60 parents: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/blog/2017/the-biggest-and-weirdest-commits-in-linux-kernel-git-history

It's pulled, and it's fine, but there's clearly a balance between "octopus merges are fine" and "Christ, that's not an octopus, that's a Cthulhu merge".

Have a look at the format for the Git commit object

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22968856/what-is-the-file-format-of-a-git-commit-object/37438460#37438460

From that analysis, we can see that the list of parents list is an arbitrary newline separated list of type:

parent {parent_1_sha}
parent {parent_2_sha}
...
parent {parent_N_sha}

and so an arbitrary number of parents is allowed.

Minimal example

Script:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -eu

mkdir tmp
cd tmp
git init

touch root
git add .
git commit -m root
sha_root="$(git log -1 --format="%H")"

touch 1
git add .
git commit -m 1
sha1="$(git log -1 --format="%H")"

git reset --hard "$sha_root"
touch 2
git add .
git commit -m 2
sha2="$(git log -1 --format="%H")"

git reset --hard "$sha_root"
touch 3
git add .
git commit -m 3
sha3="$(git log -1 --format="%H")"

git merge -m merge "$sha1" "$sha2"

Output:

*-.   2d2a6c2 (HEAD -> master) merge
|\ \  
| | * 2300c18 2
| * | 7e096cb 1
| |/  
* | 50aa125 3
|/  
* a1e94fd root