git plumbing告诉签出的分支

Question

Scripting git, I need to find out the checked-out branch name. So far it seems the only "reliable" way to do that is with git branch | sed -n '/^\\* /s///p' git branch | sed -n '/^\\* /s///p' . (Scare quotes because of things like color.branch or column.branch in .gitconfig; it's not reliable at all.) The only other thing I found is git name-rev , but that seems to return the first (sorted by names) branch that points to HEAD:

> git checkout master
> git checkout -b another
> git checkout master
> git name-rev HEAD
HEAD another

Is there something better than sed -n '\\#^ref: refs/heads/#s###p' .git/HEAD to figure out the checked out branch?

Answer 1

Just output the branch you are on with:

git rev-parse --symbolic-full-name --abbrev-ref HEAD

There should be no trouble also if you have more than one branches, and if you aren't on any branch it just gives you HEAD

Answer 2

Here's a little git invocation I've used in a couple of scripts, that either gives back refs/heads/branchname , or if you're not on a branch, it gives the SHA of your detached HEAD:

cur_branch=$(git symbolic-ref HEAD 2>> /dev/null || git rev-parse HEAD)

Removing the refs/heads/ prefix should be pretty simple, if you need it...