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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | NOTES | GIT | COLOPHON |
GIT-SYMBOLIC-REF(1) Git Manual GIT-SYMBOLIC-REF(1)
git-symbolic-ref - Read, modify and delete symbolic refs
git symbolic-ref [-m <reason>] <name> <ref>
git symbolic-ref [-q] [--short] <name>
git symbolic-ref --delete [-q] <name>
Given one argument, reads which branch head the given symbolic ref
refers to and outputs its path, relative to the .git/ directory.
Typically you would give HEAD as the <name> argument to see which
branch your working tree is on.
Given two arguments, creates or updates a symbolic ref <name> to
point at the given branch <ref>.
Given --delete and an additional argument, deletes the given symbolic
ref.
A symbolic ref is a regular file that stores a string that begins
with ref: refs/. For example, your .git/HEAD is a regular file whose
contents is ref: refs/heads/master.
-d, --delete
Delete the symbolic ref <name>.
-q, --quiet
Do not issue an error message if the <name> is not a symbolic ref
but a detached HEAD; instead exit with non-zero status silently.
--short
When showing the value of <name> as a symbolic ref, try to
shorten the value, e.g. from refs/heads/master to master.
-m
Update the reflog for <name> with <reason>. This is valid only
when creating or updating a symbolic ref.
In the past, .git/HEAD was a symbolic link pointing at
refs/heads/master. When we wanted to switch to another branch, we did
ln -sf refs/heads/newbranch .git/HEAD, and when we wanted to find out
which branch we are on, we did readlink .git/HEAD. But symbolic links
are not entirely portable, so they are now deprecated and symbolic
refs (as described above) are used by default.
git symbolic-ref will exit with status 0 if the contents of the
symbolic ref were printed correctly, with status 1 if the requested
name is not a symbolic ref, or 128 if another error occurs.
Part of the git(1) suite
This page is part of the git (Git distributed version control system)
project. Information about the project can be found at
⟨http://git-scm.com/⟩. If you have a bug report for this manual page,
see ⟨http://git-scm.com/community⟩. This page was obtained from the
project's upstream Git repository ⟨https://github.com/git/git.git⟩ on
2017-07-05. If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML ver‐
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ual page), send a mail to man-pages@man7.org
Git 2.7.0.rc1.5.gf3a 12/17/2015 GIT-SYMBOLIC-REF(1)
Pages that refer to this page: git(1), gitglossary(7)