git-rev-parse
(1)
Name
git-rev-parse - Pick out and massage parameters
Synopsis
git rev-parse [ --option ] <args>...
Description
Git Manual GIT-REV-PARSE(1)
NAME
git-rev-parse - Pick out and massage parameters
SYNOPSIS
git rev-parse [ --option ] <args>...
DESCRIPTION
Many git porcelainish commands take mixture of flags (i.e.
parameters that begin with a dash -) and parameters meant
for the underlying git rev-list command they use internally
and flags and parameters for the other commands they use
downstream of git rev-list. This command is used to
distinguish between them.
OPTIONS
--parseopt
Use git rev-parse in option parsing mode (see PARSEOPT
section below).
--keep-dashdash
Only meaningful in --parseopt mode. Tells the option
parser to echo out the first -- met instead of skipping
it.
--stop-at-non-option
Only meaningful in --parseopt mode. Lets the option
parser stop at the first non-option argument. This can
be used to parse sub-commands that take options
themselves.
--sq-quote
Use git rev-parse in shell quoting mode (see SQ-QUOTE
section below). In contrast to the --sq option below,
this mode does only quoting. Nothing else is done to
command input.
--revs-only
Do not output flags and parameters not meant for git
rev-list command.
--no-revs
Do not output flags and parameters meant for git
rev-list command.
--flags
Do not output non-flag parameters.
--no-flags
Do not output flag parameters.
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--default <arg>
If there is no parameter given by the user, use <arg>
instead.
--verify
The parameter given must be usable as a single, valid
object name. Otherwise barf and abort.
-q, --quiet
Only meaningful in --verify mode. Do not output an error
message if the first argument is not a valid object
name; instead exit with non-zero status silently.
--sq
Usually the output is made one line per flag and
parameter. This option makes output a single line,
properly quoted for consumption by shell. Useful when
you expect your parameter to contain whitespaces and
newlines (e.g. when using pickaxe -S with git diff-*).
In contrast to the --sq-quote option, the command input
is still interpreted as usual.
--not
When showing object names, prefix them with ^ and strip
^ prefix from the object names that already have one.
--symbolic
Usually the object names are output in SHA1 form (with
possible ^ prefix); this option makes them output in a
form as close to the original input as possible.
--symbolic-full-name
This is similar to --symbolic, but it omits input that
are not refs (i.e. branch or tag names; or more
explicitly disambiguating "heads/master" form, when you
want to name the "master" branch when there is an
unfortunately named tag "master"), and show them as full
refnames (e.g. "refs/heads/master").
--abbrev-ref[=(strict|loose)]
A non-ambiguous short name of the objects name. The
option core.warnAmbiguousRefs is used to select the
strict abbreviation mode.
--all
Show all refs found in refs/.
--branches[=pattern], --tags[=pattern], --remotes[=pattern]
Show all branches, tags, or remote-tracking branches,
respectively (i.e., refs found in refs/heads, refs/tags,
or refs/remotes, respectively).
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If a pattern is given, only refs matching the given
shell glob are shown. If the pattern does not contain a
globbing character (?, *, or [), it is turned into a
prefix match by appending /*.
--glob=pattern
Show all refs matching the shell glob pattern pattern.
If the pattern does not start with refs/, this is
automatically prepended. If the pattern does not contain
a globbing character (?, *, or [), it is turned into a
prefix match by appending /*.
--show-toplevel
Show the absolute path of the top-level directory.
--show-prefix
When the command is invoked from a subdirectory, show
the path of the current directory relative to the
top-level directory.
--show-cdup
When the command is invoked from a subdirectory, show
the path of the top-level directory relative to the
current directory (typically a sequence of "../", or an
empty string).
--git-dir
Show $GIT_DIR if defined. Otherwise show the path to the
.git directory, relative to the current directory.
If $GIT_DIR is not defined and the current directory is
not detected to lie in a git repository or work tree
print a message to stderr and exit with nonzero status.
--is-inside-git-dir
When the current working directory is below the
repository directory print "true", otherwise "false".
--is-inside-work-tree
When the current working directory is inside the work
tree of the repository print "true", otherwise "false".
--is-bare-repository
When the repository is bare print "true", otherwise
"false".
--local-env-vars
List the GIT_* environment variables that are local to
the repository (e.g. GIT_DIR or GIT_WORK_TREE, but not
GIT_EDITOR). Only the names of the variables are listed,
not their value, even if they are set.
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--short, --short=number
Instead of outputting the full SHA1 values of object
names try to abbreviate them to a shorter unique name.
When no length is specified 7 is used. The minimum
length is 4.
--since=datestring, --after=datestring
Parse the date string, and output the corresponding
--max-age= parameter for git rev-list.
--until=datestring, --before=datestring
Parse the date string, and output the corresponding
--min-age= parameter for git rev-list.
<args>...
Flags and parameters to be parsed.
--resolve-git-dir <path>
Check if <path> is a valid git-dir or a git-file
pointing to a valid git-dir. If <path> is a valid
git-dir the resolved path to git-dir will be printed.
SPECIFYING REVISIONS
A revision parameter <rev> typically, but not necessarily,
names a commit object. It uses what is called an extended
SHA1 syntax. Here are various ways to spell object names.
The ones listed near the end of this list name trees and
blobs contained in a commit.
<sha1>, e.g. dae86e1950b1277e545cee180551750029cfe735,
dae86e
The full SHA1 object name (40-byte hexadecimal string),
or a leading substring that is unique within the
repository. E.g.
dae86e1950b1277e545cee180551750029cfe735 and dae86e both
name the same commit object if there is no other object
in your repository whose object name starts with dae86e.
<describeOutput>, e.g. v1.7.4.2-679-g3bee7fb
Output from git describe; i.e. a closest tag, optionally
followed by a dash and a number of commits, followed by
a dash, a g, and an abbreviated object name.
<refname>, e.g. master, heads/master, refs/heads/master
A symbolic ref name. E.g. master typically means the
commit object referenced by refs/heads/master. If you
happen to have both heads/master and tags/master, you
can explicitly say heads/master to tell git which one
you mean. When ambiguous, a <name> is disambiguated by
taking the first match in the following rules:
1. If $GIT_DIR/<name> exists, that is what you mean
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(this is usually useful only for HEAD, FETCH_HEAD,
ORIG_HEAD, MERGE_HEAD and CHERRY_PICK_HEAD);
2. otherwise, refs/<name> if it exists;
3. otherwise, refs/tags/<refname> if it exists;
4. otherwise, refs/heads/<name> if it exists;
5. otherwise, refs/remotes/<name> if it exists;
6. otherwise, refs/remotes/<name>/HEAD if it exists.
HEAD names the commit on which you based the changes
in the working tree. FETCH_HEAD records the branch
which you fetched from a remote repository with your
last git fetch invocation. ORIG_HEAD is created by
commands that move your HEAD in a drastic way, to
record the position of the HEAD before their
operation, so that you can easily change the tip of
the branch back to the state before you ran them.
MERGE_HEAD records the commit(s) which you are
merging into your branch when you run git merge.
CHERRY_PICK_HEAD records the commit which you are
cherry-picking when you run git cherry-pick.
Note that any of the refs/* cases above may come
either from the $GIT_DIR/refs directory or from the
$GIT_DIR/packed-refs file.
<refname>@{<date>}, e.g. master@{yesterday}, HEAD@{5 minutes
ago}
A ref followed by the suffix @ with a date specification
enclosed in a brace pair (e.g. {yesterday}, {1 month 2
weeks 3 days 1 hour 1 second ago} or {1979-02-26
18:30:00}) specifies the value of the ref at a prior
point in time. This suffix may only be used immediately
following a ref name and the ref must have an existing
log ($GIT_DIR/logs/<ref>). Note that this looks up the
state of your local ref at a given time; e.g., what was
in your local master branch last week. If you want to
look at commits made during certain times, see --since
and --until.
<refname>@{<n>}, e.g. master@{1}
A ref followed by the suffix @ with an ordinal
specification enclosed in a brace pair (e.g. {1}, {15})
specifies the n-th prior value of that ref. For example
master@{1} is the immediate prior value of master while
master@{5} is the 5th prior value of master. This suffix
may only be used immediately following a ref name and
the ref must have an existing log
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($GIT_DIR/logs/<refname>).
@{<n>}, e.g. @{1}
You can use the @ construct with an empty ref part to
get at a reflog entry of the current branch. For
example, if you are on branch blabla then @{1} means the
same as blabla@{1}.
@{-<n>}, e.g. @{-1}
The construct @{-<n>} means the <n>th branch checked out
before the current one.
<refname>@{upstream}, e.g. master@{upstream}, @{u}
The suffix @{upstream} to a ref (short form
<refname>@{u}) refers to the branch the ref is set to
build on top of. A missing ref defaults to the current
branch.
<rev>^, e.g. HEAD^, v1.5.1^0
A suffix ^ to a revision parameter means the first
parent of that commit object. ^<n> means the <n>th
parent (i.e. <rev>^ is equivalent to <rev>^1). As a
special rule, <rev>^0 means the commit itself and is
used when <rev> is the object name of a tag object that
refers to a commit object.
<rev>~<n>, e.g. master~3
A suffix ~<n> to a revision parameter means the commit
object that is the <n>th generation grand-parent of the
named commit object, following only the first parents.
I.e. <rev>~3 is equivalent to <rev>^^^ which is
equivalent to <rev>^1^1^1. See below for an illustration
of the usage of this form.
<rev>^{<type>}, e.g. v0.99.8^{commit}
A suffix ^ followed by an object type name enclosed in
brace pair means the object could be a tag, and
dereference the tag recursively until an object of that
type is found or the object cannot be dereferenced
anymore (in which case, barf). <rev>^0 is a short-hand
for <rev>^{commit}.
<rev>^{}, e.g. v0.99.8^{}
A suffix ^ followed by an empty brace pair means the
object could be a tag, and dereference the tag
recursively until a non-tag object is found.
<rev>^{/<text>}, e.g. HEAD^{/fix nasty bug}
A suffix ^ to a revision parameter, followed by a brace
pair that contains a text led by a slash, is the same as
the :/fix nasty bug syntax below except that it returns
the youngest matching commit which is reachable from the
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<rev> before ^.
:/<text>, e.g. :/fix nasty bug
A colon, followed by a slash, followed by a text, names
a commit whose commit message matches the specified
regular expression. This name returns the youngest
matching commit which is reachable from any ref. If the
commit message starts with a ! you have to repeat that;
the special sequence :/!, followed by something else
than !, is reserved for now. The regular expression can
match any part of the commit message. To match messages
starting with a string, one can use e.g. :/^foo.
<rev>:<path>, e.g. HEAD:README, :README, master:./README
A suffix : followed by a path names the blob or tree at
the given path in the tree-ish object named by the part
before the colon. :path (with an empty part before the
colon) is a special case of the syntax described next:
content recorded in the index at the given path. A path
starting with ./ or ../ is relative to the current
working directory. The given path will be converted to
be relative to the working tree's root directory. This
is most useful to address a blob or tree from a commit
or tree that has the same tree structure as the working
tree.
:<n>:<path>, e.g. :0:README, :README
A colon, optionally followed by a stage number (0 to 3)
and a colon, followed by a path, names a blob object in
the index at the given path. A missing stage number (and
the colon that follows it) names a stage 0 entry. During
a merge, stage 1 is the common ancestor, stage 2 is the
target branch's version (typically the current branch),
and stage 3 is the version from the branch which is
being merged.
Here is an illustration, by Jon Loeliger. Both commit nodes
B and C are parents of commit node A. Parent commits are
ordered left-to-right.
G H I J
\ / \ /
D E F
\ | / \
\ | / |
\|/ |
B C
\ /
\ /
A
A = = A^0
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B = A^ = A^1 = A~1
C = A^2 = A^2
D = A^^ = A^1^1 = A~2
E = B^2 = A^^2
F = B^3 = A^^3
G = A^^^ = A^1^1^1 = A~3
H = D^2 = B^^2 = A^^^2 = A~2^2
I = F^ = B^3^ = A^^3^
J = F^2 = B^3^2 = A^^3^2
SPECIFYING RANGES
History traversing commands such as git log operate on a set
of commits, not just a single commit. To these commands,
specifying a single revision with the notation described in
the previous section means the set of commits reachable from
that commit, following the commit ancestry chain.
To exclude commits reachable from a commit, a prefix ^
notation is used. E.g. ^r1 r2 means commits reachable from
r2 but exclude the ones reachable from r1.
This set operation appears so often that there is a
shorthand for it. When you have two commits r1 and r2 (named
according to the syntax explained in SPECIFYING REVISIONS
above), you can ask for commits that are reachable from r2
excluding those that are reachable from r1 by ^r1 r2 and it
can be written as r1..r2.
A similar notation r1...r2 is called symmetric difference of
r1 and r2 and is defined as r1 r2 --not $(git merge-base
--all r1 r2). It is the set of commits that are reachable
from either one of r1 or r2 but not from both.
Two other shorthands for naming a set that is formed by a
commit and its parent commits exist. The r1^@ notation means
all parents of r1. r1^! includes commit r1 but excludes all
of its parents.
Here are a handful of examples:
D G H D
D F G H I J D F
^G D H D
^D B E I J F B
B...C G H D E B C
^D B C E I J F B C
C^@ I J F
F^! D G H D F
PARSEOPT
In --parseopt mode, git rev-parse helps massaging options to
bring to shell scripts the same facilities C builtins have.
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It works as an option normalizer (e.g. splits single
switches aggregate values), a bit like getopt(1) does.
It takes on the standard input the specification of the
options to parse and understand, and echoes on the standard
output a string suitable for sh(1) eval to replace the
arguments with normalized ones. In case of error, it outputs
usage on the standard error stream, and exits with code 129.
Note: Make sure you quote the result when passing it to
eval. See below for an example.
Input Format
git rev-parse --parseopt input format is fully text based.
It has two parts, separated by a line that contains only --.
The lines before the separator (should be more than one) are
used for the usage. The lines after the separator describe
the options.
Each line of options has this format:
<opt_spec><flags>* SP+ help LF
<opt_spec>
its format is the short option character, then the long
option name separated by a comma. Both parts are not
required, though at least one is necessary. h,help,
dry-run and f are all three correct <opt_spec>.
<flags>
<flags> are of *, =, ? or !.
o Use = if the option takes an argument.
o Use ? to mean that the option is optional (though
its use is discouraged).
o Use * to mean that this option should not be listed
in the usage generated for the -h argument. It's
shown for --help-all as documented in gitcli(5).
o Use ! to not make the corresponding negated long
option available.
The remainder of the line, after stripping the spaces, is
used as the help associated to the option.
Blank lines are ignored, and lines that don't match this
specification are used as option group headers (start the
line with a space to create such lines on purpose).
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Example
OPTS_SPEC="\
some-command [options] <args>...
some-command does foo and bar!
--
h,help show the help
foo some nifty option --foo
bar= some cool option --bar with an argument
An option group Header
C? option C with an optional argument"
eval "$(echo "$OPTS_SPEC" | git rev-parse --parseopt -- "$@" || echo exit $?)"
SQ-QUOTE
In --sq-quote mode, git rev-parse echoes on the standard
output a single line suitable for sh(1) eval. This line is
made by normalizing the arguments following --sq-quote.
Nothing other than quoting the arguments is done.
If you want command input to still be interpreted as usual
by git rev-parse before the output is shell quoted, see the
--sq option.
Example
$ cat >your-git-script.sh <<\EOF
#!/bin/sh
args=$(git rev-parse --sq-quote "$@") # quote user-supplied arguments
command="git frotz -n24 $args" # and use it inside a handcrafted
# command line
eval "$command"
EOF
$ sh your-git-script.sh "a b'c"
EXAMPLES
o Print the object name of the current commit:
$ git rev-parse --verify HEAD
o Print the commit object name from the revision in the
$REV shell variable:
$ git rev-parse --verify $REV
This will error out if $REV is empty or not a valid
revision.
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o Same as above:
$ git rev-parse --default master --verify $REV
but if $REV is empty, the commit object name from master
will be printed.
GIT
Part of the git(1) suite
ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following
attributes:
+---------------+--------------------------+
|ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE |
+---------------+--------------------------+
|Availability | developer/versioning/git |
+---------------+--------------------------+
|Stability | Uncommitted |
+---------------+--------------------------+
NOTES
This software was built from source available at
https://java.net/projects/solaris-userland. The original
community source was downloaded from http://git-
core.googlecode.com/files/git-1.7.9.2.tar.gz
Further information about this software can be found on the
open source community website at http://git-scm.com/.
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