Testing for existence of a remote branch from a script

Hi,

I look after some scripts we use at $dayjob for pushing changes though our review system.

For some of our repositories we operate a triangular workflow where changes are fetched from one branch (e.g. 'foo') but are pushed to a different one ('foo_incoming'). Our CI system runs to test the changes and when they pass 'foo_incoming' is merged (fast-forward most of the time) into 'foo'.

The problem I have is not all our projects use this workflow so I've tried to automate the detection of this. My script does something like

  br=$(git rev-parse --symbolic-full-name
refs/remotes/origin/foo_incoming -- 2>/dev/null || echo
refs/remotes/origin/foo)

The '--' is necessary because if foo_incoming doesn't exist then there is extra output on stdout that puts off users. But when foo_incoming does exist then br gets set to `refs/remotes/origin/foo_incoming\n--`.

Is there a better way of checking for the existence of a remote branch?

Thanks, Chris