How to programmatically determine the current chec

Question

This question already has answers here:

How to get the current branch name in Git? (38 answers)

Closed 2 years ago.

In a Unix or GNU scripting environment (e.g. a Linux distro, Cygwin, OSX), what is the best way to determine which Git branch is currently checked out in a working directory?

One use of this technique would be automatically labeling a release (like svnversion would do with Subversion).

Please also see my related question: How to programmatically determine whether a Git checkout is a tag, and if so what is the tag name?

Answer 1

Here is what I do:

git branch | sed --quiet 's/* \(.*\)/\1/p'

The output would look like this:

$ git branch | sed --quiet 's/* \(.*\)/\1/p'
master
$

Answer 2

I found that calling git is rather slow (any of the subcommands), especially for updating the prompt. Time varies between .1 and .2 seconds within the root dir of a repo, and over .2 seconds outside a repo, on a top notch machine (raid 1, 8 gb ram, 8 hardware threads). It does run Cygwin, though.

Therefore I wrote this script for speed:

#!/usr/bin/perl

$cwd=$ENV{PWD}; #`pwd`;
chomp $cwd;

while (length $cwd)
{
        -d "$cwd/.git" and do {
                -f "$cwd/.git/HEAD" and do {
                        open IN, "<", "$cwd/.git/HEAD";
                        $_=<IN>;
                        close IN;
                        s@ref: refs/heads/@@;
                        print $_;
                };
                exit;
        };

        $cwd=~s@/[^/]*$@@;
}

May need some tweaking.

Answer 3

This one worked for me in the bash file.

git branch | grep '^*' | sed 's/* //'  


################bash file###################
#!/bin/bash
BRANCH=$(git branch | grep '^*' | sed 's/* //' )
echo $BRANCH

Answer 4

If you are on a detached head (i.e. you've checked out a release) and have an output from git status such as

HEAD detached at v1.7.3.1

And you want the release version, we use the following command...

git status --branch | head -n1 | tr -d 'A-Za-z: '

This returns 1.7.3.1, which we replace in our parameters.yml (Symfony) with

# RevNum=`svn status -u | grep revision | tr -d 'A-Za-z: '`  # the old SVN version
RevNum=`git status --branch | head -n1 | tr -d 'A-Za-z: '` # Git (obvs)

sed -i "/^    app_version:/c\    app_version:$RevNum" app/config/parameters.yml

Hope this helps :) Obviously if you have non-numerics in your branch name, you'll need to alter the arguments to the tr command.

Answer 5

you can use git name-rev --name-only HEAD

Answer 6

adapting the accepted answer to windows powershell:

Split-Path -Leaf (git symbolic-ref HEAD)