7.1 Git Tools - Revision Selection

You can obviously refer to a commit by the SHA-1 hash that it’s given, but there are more human-friendly ways to refer to commits as well. This section outlines the various ways you can refer to a single commit.

Git is smart enough to figure out what commit you meant to type if you provide the first few characters, as long as your partial SHA-1 is at least four characters long and unambiguous – that is, only one object in the current repository begins with that partial SHA-1.

For example, to see a specific commit, suppose you run a git log command and identify the commit where you added certain functionality:

In this case, choose 1c002dd.... If you git show that commit, the following commands are equivalent (assuming the shorter versions are unambiguous):

Git can figure out a short, unique abbreviation for your SHA-1 values. If you pass --abbrev-commit to the git log command, the output will use shorter values but keep them unique; it defaults to using seven characters but makes them longer if necessary to keep the SHA-1 unambiguous:

Generally, eight to ten characters are more than enough to be unique within a project.

As an example, the Linux kernel, which is a pretty large project with over 450k commits and 3.6 million objects, has no two objects whose SHAs overlap more than the first 11 characters.

The most straightforward way to specify a commit requires that it have a branch reference pointed at it. Then, you can use a branch name in any Git command that expects a commit object or SHA-1 value. For instance, if you want to show the last commit object on a branch, the following commands are equivalent, assuming that the topic1 branch points to ca82a6d:

If you want to see which specific SHA a branch points to, or if you want to see what any of these examples boils down to in terms of SHAs, you can use a Git plumbing tool called rev-parse. You can see Git Internals for more information about plumbing tools; basically, rev-parse exists for lower-level operations and isn’t designed to be used in day-to-day operations. However, it can be helpful sometimes when you need to see what’s really going on. Here you can run rev-parse on your branch.

One of the things Git does in the background while you’re working away is keep a “reflog” – a log of where your HEAD and branch references have been for the last few months.

You can see your reflog by using git reflog:

Every time your branch tip is updated for any reason, Git stores that information for you in this temporary history. And you can specify older commits with this data, as well. If you want to see the fifth prior value of the HEAD of your repository, you can use the @{n} reference that you see in the reflog output:

You can also use this syntax to see where a branch was some specific amount of time ago. For instance, to see where your master branch was yesterday, you can type

That shows you where the branch tip was yesterday. This technique only works for data that’s still in your reflog, so you can’t use it to look for commits older than a few months.

To see reflog information formatted like the git log output, you can run git log -g:

It’s important to note that the reflog information is strictly local – it’s a log of what you’ve done in your repository. The references won’t be the same on someone else’s copy of the repository; and right after you initially clone a repository, you’ll have an empty reflog, as no activity has occurred yet in your repository. Running git show HEAD@{2.months.ago} will work only if you cloned the project at least two months ago – if you cloned it five minutes ago, you’ll get no results.

The other main way to specify a commit is via its ancestry. If you place a ^ at the end of a reference, Git resolves it to mean the parent of that commit. Suppose you look at the history of your project:

Then, you can see the previous commit by specifying HEAD^, which means “the parent of HEAD”:

You can also specify a number after the ^ – for example, d921970^2 means “the second parent of d921970.” This syntax is only useful for merge commits, which have more than one parent. The first parent is the branch you were on when you merged, and the second is the commit on the branch that you merged in:

The other main ancestry specification is the ~. This also refers to the first parent, so HEAD~ and HEAD^ are equivalent. The difference becomes apparent when you specify a number. HEAD~2 means “the first parent of the first parent,” or “the grandparent” – it traverses the first parents the number of times you specify. For example, in the history listed earlier, HEAD~3 would be

This can also be written HEAD^^^, which again is the first parent of the first parent of the first parent:

You can also combine these syntaxes – you can get the second parent of the previous reference (assuming it was a merge commit) by using HEAD~3^2, and so on.

Now that you can specify individual commits, let’s see how to specify ranges of commits. This is particularly useful for managing your branches – if you have a lot of branches, you can use range specifications to answer questions such as, “What work is on this branch that I haven’t yet merged into my main branch?”