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

This doesn't show the filenames, but at least you get a feel of the repository.

cat .git/refs/tags/*

Each file in that directory contains a commit SHA pointing to a commit.

Answer 2

You could as well get more easy-to-interpret picture of where tags point to using

git log --graph |git name-rev --stdin --tags |less

and then scroll to the tag you're looking for via /.

More compact view (--pretty=oneline) plus all heads (-a) could also help:

git log -a --pretty=oneline --graph |git name-rev --stdin --tags |less

Looks a bit terrifying, but could also be aliased in ~/.gitconfig if necessary.

~/.gitconfig

[alias]
ls-tags = !git log -a --pretty=oneline --graph |git name-rev --stdin --tags |less

Answer 3

From Igor Zevaka:

Summary

Since there are about 4 almost equally acceptable yet different answers I will summarise all the different ways to skin a tag.

1. git rev-list -1 $TAG (answer). git rev-list outputs the commits that lead up to the $TAG similar to git log but only showing the SHA1 of the commit. The -1 limits the output to the commit it points at.

2. git show-ref --tags (answer) will show all tags (local and fetched from remote) and their SHA1s.

3. git show-ref $TAG (answer) will show the tag and its path along with the SHA1.

4. git rev-parse $TAG (answer) will show the SHA1 of an unannotated tag.

5. git rev-parse --verify $TAG^{commit} (answer) will show a SHA1 of both annotated and unannotated tags. On Windows use git rev-parse --verify %TAG%^^^^{commit} (four hats).

6. cat .git/refs/tags/* or cat .git/packed-refs (answer) depending on whether or not the tag is local or fetched from remote.

Answer 4

In order to get the sha/hash of the commit that a tag refers to (not the sha of the tag):

git rev-list -1 <tag>

Answer 5

Just use git show <tag>

However, it also dumps commit diffs. To omit those diffs, use git log -1 <tag>. (Thanks to @DolphinDream and @demisx !)

Answer 6

How about this:

git log -1 $TAGNAME

OR

git log -1 origin/$TAGNAME