Re: How to get the branch HEAD points to using a plumbing command?

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Tue, Jan 05, 2021 at 04:24:56PM +0100, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

> > My question is, is there a "better" (more idiomatic, less
> > "expensive", etc.) way of doing it using only one plumbing command?
> > This solution is OK but it is more work than just matching one line
> > with a regular expression. The reason I want to do this using only
> > plumbing commands is because I think that plumbing command interface
> > would be more stable than the format (organization, structure) of
> > files under the `.git/` directory across Git versions. Please
> > correct me if I'm wrong in this idea as well.
> 
> You'll want to use git-rev-parse for this, e.g.:
> 
>     $ git rev-parse --symbolic-full-name HEAD
>     refs/heads/master

Another option is:

  git symbolic-ref HEAD

which has the benefit of working even when HEAD points to an unborn
branch. It also has a --short option to drop the refs/heads/ part.

It's also worth noting what you'd see on a detached HEAD. With rev-parse
you'll see "HEAD", but symbolic-ref will exit with a non-zero code.

-Peff