How to get the current branch name in Git?

Question

I\'m from a Subversion background and, when I had a branch, I knew what I was working on with \"These working files point to this branch\".

But with Git I\'m not sur

Answer 1

Sorry this is another command-line answer, but that's what I was looking for when I found this question and many of these answers were helpful. My solution is the following bash shell function:

get_branch () {
    git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD | grep -v HEAD || \
    git describe --exact-match HEAD 2> /dev/null || \
    git rev-parse HEAD
}

This should always give me something both human-readable and directly usable as an argument to git checkout.

• on a local branch: feature/HS-0001
• on a tagged commit (detached): v3.29.5
• on a remote branch (detached, not tagged): SHA1
• on any other detached commit: SHA1

Answer 2

git status 

will also give the branch name along with changes.

e.g.

>git status
On branch master // <-- branch name here
.....

Answer 3

#!/bin/bash
function git.branch {
  br=`git branch | grep "*"`
  echo ${br/* /}
}
git.branch

Answer 4

Over time, we might have a really long list of branches.

While some of the other solutions are great, Here is what I do (simplified from Jacob's answer):

git branch | grep \*

Now,

git status

works, but only If there are any local changes

Answer 5

I know this is late but on a linux/mac ,from the terminal you can use the following.

git status | sed -n 1p

Explanation:

git status -> gets the working tree status
sed -n 1p -> gets the first line from the status body

Response to the above command will look as follows:

"On branch your_branch_name"

Answer 6

Well simple enough, I got it in a one liner (bash)

git branch | sed -n '/\* /s///p'

(credit: Limited Atonement)

And while I am there, the one liner to get the remote tracking branch (if any)

git rev-parse --symbolic-full-name --abbrev-ref @{u}