How to tell which commit a tag points to in Git?

Question

I have a bunch of unannotated tags in the repository and I want to work out which commit they point to. Is there a command that that will just list the tags and their commit SHAs? Checking out the tag and looking at the HEAD seems a bit too laborious to me.

Update

I realized after I went through the responses that what I actually wanted was to simply look at the history leading up to the tag, for which git log <tagname> is sufficient.

The answer that is marked as answer is useful for getting a list of tags and their commits, which is what I asked. With a bit of shell hackery I'm sure it's possible to transform those into SHA+Commit message.

Answer 1

Even though this is pretty old, I thought I would point out a cool feature I just found for listing tags with commits:

git log --decorate=full

It will show the branches which end/start at a commit, and the tags for commits.

Answer 2

From git mailing list, here is the way to get the list of commit hashes for tags with automatic dereferencing for annotated tags:

git for-each-ref --format='%(if)%(*objectname)%(then)%(*objectname)%(else)%(objectname)%(end) %(refname)' refs/tags

Answer 3

git show-ref --tags

For example, git show-ref --abbrev=7 --tags will show you something like the following:

f727215 refs/tags/v2.16.0
56072ac refs/tags/v2.17.0
b670805 refs/tags/v2.17.1
250ed01 refs/tags/v2.17.2

Answer 4

i'd also like to know the right way, but you can always peek either into:

$ cat .git/packed-refs 

or:

$ cat .git/refs/tags/*

Answer 5

So I have a load of release folders, where those folders may be checked out from one of a few different repos, and may be dev, qa or master branches or may be production releases, checked out from a tag, and the tag may be annotated or not. I have a script that will look at the target folder and get be back an answer in the form -. The problem is different versions of git return different status' for a tag checkout.

So I found git show-ref --tags worked initially, except for the annotated tags. However adding -d added a separate entry to the list of tags, one for the tag, the other for the annotation (the annotation commit was identified as ^{} which I stripped out with sed).

So this is the core of my script, for anyone that wants it:-

REPO=`git --git-dir=${TARGET} remote show origin -n | \
         grep "Fetch URL:" | \
         sed -E "s/^.*\/(.*)$/\1/" | \
         sed "s/.git$//"`

TAG=`git --git-dir=${TARGET} show-ref -d --tags | \
         grep \`git --git-dir=${TARGET} show --quiet --format=format:%H HEAD\` | \
         cut -d\  -f2 | \
         cut -d/ -f3 | \
         sed "s/\^{}$//"`

if [ "${TAG}" == "" ] ; then 
  BRANCH=`git --git-dir=${TARGET} show-ref --heads | \
         grep \`git --git-dir=${TARGET} show --quiet --format=format:%H HEAD\` | \
         cut -d\  -f2 | \
         cut -d/ -f3`
  TAG=${BRANCH}
fi

Answer 6

Use

git rev-parse --verify <tag>^{commit}

(which would return SHA-1 of a commit even for annotated tag).

---

git show-ref <tag> would also work if <tag> is not annotated. And there is always git for-each-ref (see documentation for details).