Notation for current branch?

I wonder if there's an easy to use notation to refer to the current branch? which is expected be friendly to scripting.

For HEAD, there's @, which is short and concise.

But for the current branch, it seems one has to either use a not so friendly plumbing command, or grep/parse the output of `git branch`, since the latter doesn't even has any option to only print the plain name of the current branch, or maybe an option can be added to `git branch`?

Thoughts?

On Sun, Aug 28, 2016 at 05:58:18PM +0800, ryenus wrote:

Scripts should always rely on plubming commands, never on porcelain, as their output will change, and thus, break scripts.

To get the current branch name, the best is to use `git rev-parse --symbolic-full-name`[1], which either returns you the current branch name (eg refs/heads/master), or HEAD, when you have a detached HEAD. If you only want the friendly name, add --abbrev-ref, which would then return master.

[1]: git symbolic-ref HEAD would also work, but errors out when you're not on a branch.

W dniu 28.08.2016 o 12:51, Kevin Daudt pisze:

What's wrong with simply using 'HEAD' for scripting?

It is not something theoretical; the output of "git branch" for detached HEAD
(aka anonymous / unnamed branch) did change.
 

Note that in some cases current branch is implied, like e.g. in "@{<n>}" notation.

On Sun, Aug 28, 2016 at 6:56 AM, Jakub Narębski <jnareb@gmail.com> wrote:

When you want to display the current branch to the user, e.g. when scripting a shell prompt or similar use

Thanks, Jake

Jacob Keller <jacob.keller@gmail.com> writes:

Wait. Even if a hypothetical version of Git understood @@ as "the current branch", how would you use that notation, instead of HEAD, to decide what to "display the current branch to the user"?

You obviously will not be doing

	echo @@

You would be doing something around "git symbolic-ref" at the very least, and wouldn't you be feeding HEAD to that symbolic-ref anyway while doing so?

On Mon, Aug 29, 2016 at 12:49 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Hmm. You are right, I mis-understood the original question. Use of "git symbolic-ref" seems like the right thing if you need to obtain the current branch name, and there's no reason to not just use HEAD there.

Thanks, Jake

Really? Any reason why `git rev-parse --abbrev-ref '@{-1}'` works, but not `git symbolic-ref '@{-1}'`, or even `git symbolic-ref @`?

BTW, possible to make the curly brances optional in `@{n}`, `@{-n}`, and the alike? coz they require quoting/escaping, and more typing :(

On 30 August 2016 at 03:49, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

For now the best use case I can think of is with git-reflog, e.g., the meaning of `git reflog HEAD` and `git reflog feature-branch` are quite different, even if I'm currently on the feature-branch, especially when I want to track the rebase histories (if any).

If there's a notation for the current branch then I don't have to find the name of the current branch, then copy/paste it. However, in this case, maybe git-reflog can have a `-b` option to show the reflog of the current branch (if on any)?

- ryenus

ryenus <ryenus@gmail.com> writes:

"git reflog" gives you the reflog of HEAD in numbered format (HEAD@{1}, HEAD@{2}, etc.), and "git reflog HEAD@{now}" is an interesting way to tell it "I want that same HEAD reflog but not in numbered but in timed format).

"git reflog @{0}" and "git reflog @{now}" give you the reflog of the current branch in these formats.