What is HEAD in Git?

Question

You see the Git documentation saying things like

The branch must be fully merged in HEAD.

But what is Git HEAD exac

Answer 1

Take a look at Creating and playing with branches

HEAD is actually a file whose contents determines where the HEAD variable refers:

$ cat .git/HEAD
ref: refs/heads/master
$ cat .git/refs/heads/master
35ede5c916f88d8ba5a9dd6afd69fcaf773f70ed

In this repository, the contents of the HEAD file refers to a second file named refs/heads/master. The file refs/heads/master contains the hash of the most recent commit on the master branch.

The result is HEAD points to the master branch commit from the .git/refs/heads/master file.