Re: Trouble with cat-file on tags

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Apr 1, 2016, 12:26 UTC
Message-ID: <20160401122631.GA12019@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <ndlgsc$ed7$1@ger.gmane.org>

On Fri, Apr 01, 2016 at 12:00:44PM +0200, Sebastian Schuberth wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> This means
> 
> $ git cat-file tag refs/tags/v0.1.2
> 
> displays the *contents* of the tag, not the tag itself.

Right. `cat-file` is about looking at object content.

Show 6 quoted lines

> Which leads me to
> the next question: For a given name of an annotated tag, how to get the hash
> of the tag object? The solution I found for now:
> 
> $ git show-ref --tags -- v0.1.2
> 92b67e2b0626519ef8cd4e9cacb2bdafba6d53f0 refs/tags/v0.1.2

Here you just want to resolve the ref, without looking at the object. The canonical way is:

  git rev-parse --verify v0.1.2

You can also use that to peel the tag to a commit, or a commit to a tree (e.g., with "v0.1.2^{commit}").

-Peff