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

You have also git symbolic-ref HEAD which displays the full refspec.

To show only the branch name in Git v1.8 and later (thank's to Greg for pointing that out):

git symbolic-ref --short HEAD

On Git v1.7+ you can also do:

git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD

Both should give the same branch name if you're on a branch. If you're on a detached head answers differ.

Note:

On an earlier client, this seems to work:

git symbolic-ref HEAD | sed -e "s/^refs\/heads\///"

– Darien 26. Mar 2014

Answer 2

I have a simple script called git-cbr (current branch) which prints out the current branch name.

#!/bin/bash

git branch | grep -e "^*"

I put this script in a custom folder (~/.bin). The folder is in $PATH.

So now when I'm in a git repo, I just simply type git cbr to print out the current branch name.

$ git cbr
* master

This works because the git command takes its first argument and tries to run a script that goes by the name of git-arg1. For instance, git branch tries to run a script called git-branch, etc.

Answer 3

A less noisy version for git status would do the trick

git status -bsuno

It prints out

## branch-name

Answer 4

One more alternative:

git name-rev --name-only HEAD

Answer 5

In Netbeans, ensure that versioning annotations are enabled (View -> Show Versioning Labels). You can then see the branch name next to project name.

http://netbeans.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=213582

Answer 6

Found a command line solution of the same length as Oliver Refalo's, using good ol' awk:

git branch | awk '/^\*/{print $2}'

awk reads that as "do the stuff in {} on lines matching the regex". By default it assumes whitespace-delimited fields, so you print the second. If you can assume that only the line with your branch has the *, you can drop the ^. Ah, bash golf!