We'll use the same repository as in the previous example:

$ git clone https://github.com/dvaske/offline-sharing.git
$ cd offline-sharing

Create the master branch locally without checking out:

$ git branch master origin/master

Make sure we have develop checked out:

$ git checkout develop

We'll pretend that we have been working on the develop branch and have made some commits. Now, we need to format patches for all these commits so we can send them to the repository maintainer or carry them to another machine.

Let's see the commits on develop not on master:

$ git log --oneline master..develop
c131c8b Adds functionality to prime-test a range of numbers
274a7a8 Adds Makefile for easy building
88798da Move print functionality of is_prime

Now, instead of running git format-patch -3 to get patches made for these 3 commits, we'll tell Git to create patches for all the commits that are not on the master branch:

$ git format-patch -o not-on-master master
not-on-master/0001-Move-print-functionality-of-is_prime.patch
not-on-master/0002-Adds-Makefile-for-easy-building.patch
not-on-master/0003-Adds-functionality-to-prime-test-a-range-of-numbers.patch

Git makes a list of commits from develop that are not on the master branch, much like we did before creating the patches, and makes patches for these. We can check the content of the folder not-on-master, which we specified as the output folder (-o) and verify that it contains the patches as expected:

$ ls -1 not-on-master
0001-Move-print-functionality-of-is_prime.patch
0002-Adds-Makefile-for-easy-building.patch
0003-Adds-functionality-to-prime-test-a-range-of-numbers.patch

The git format-patch command has many options and besides the -<n> option to specify the number of commits in order to create patches for and the -o <dir> for the target directory, some useful options are as follows: