Re: git-branch --print-current

From: Alexandre Dulaunoy <adulau@gmail.com>
Date: Jan 4, 2009, 10:07 UTC
Message-ID: <1baa801f0901040207r64195594m64359dbc60a5f662@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <quack.20090101T1928.lthzliaqtdf@roar.cs.berkeley.edu>

On Fri, Jan 2, 2009 at 4:28 AM, Karl Chen <quarl@cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

>
> How about an option to git-branch that just prints the name of the
> current branch for scripts' sake?  To replace:
>
>    git branch --no-color 2>/dev/null | perl -ne '/^[*] (.*)/ && print $1'

I tend to support your request especially that extracting the current branch is something that is done regularly. Looking in my own scripts/aliases and some of my colleagues, there are plenty of variation using Perl, sed, awk, tr and Python to extract the current branch.

Using git-symbolic-ref is not obvious, especially that the summary/name
 of the man page is :

"git-symbolic-ref - Read and modify symbolic refs"

But the description is pretty clear :

"Given one argument, reads which branch head the given symbolic ref refers to and outputs its path, relative to the .git/ directory. Typically you would give HEAD as the <name> argument to see on which branch your working tree is on."

But naturally, as a lazy user, you will pick git-branch especially that's the tools is listed with the most commonly used git commands with a very attractive description :

"branch     List, create, or delete branches"

On an user perspective, having the option in git-branch seems more natural.

Just a comment,

-- 
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