Commit without setting user.email and user.name

(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.

You can edit the .git/config file in your repo to add the following alias :

[alias]
  paulcommit = -c user.name='Paul Draper' -c user.email='[email protected]' commit

or you can do this by command line :

git config alias.paulcommit "-c user.name='Paul Draper' -c user.email='[email protected]' commit"

And then you can do :

git paulcommit -m "..."

Remarks:

• The idea is then to add also aliases like jeancommit, georgecommit, ... for the other users of this shared box.
• You can add this alias to your global config by editing your personal .gitconfig or by adding --global option to the command line when adding the alias.
• The alias paulcommit is not a short one, but it is verbose and you can in general type only git pau+tab.