Re: Notation for current branch?

From: Kevin Daudt <me@ikke.info>
To: ryenus <ryenus@gmail.com>
Cc: git@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Notation for current branch?
Date: Sun, 28 Aug 2016 12:51:59 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20160828105159.GA5477@ikke.info> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAKkAvazQxhtQauSb3MTVhzoK=xWbjMzQLBPQZUpp1n7VMUMJbQ@mail.gmail.com>

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

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.