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} div.exampleblock-content { border-left: 2px solid silver; padding-left: 0.5em; } /* IE6 sets dynamically generated links as visited. */ div#toc a:visited { color: blue; } </style> </head> <body> <div id="header"> <h1> git-symbolic-ref(1) Manual Page </h1> <h2>NAME</h2> <div class="sectionbody"> <p>git-symbolic-ref - Read and modify symbolic refs </p> </div> </div> <h2 id="_synopsis">SYNOPSIS</h2> <div class="sectionbody"> <div class="paragraph"><p><em>git symbolic-ref</em> [-q] [-m <reason>] <name> [<ref>]</p></div> </div> <h2 id="_description">DESCRIPTION</h2> <div class="sectionbody"> <div class="paragraph"><p>Given one argument, reads which branch head the given symbolic ref refers to and outputs its path, relative to the <tt>.git/</tt> directory. Typically you would give <tt>HEAD</tt> as the <name> argument to see which branch your working tree is on.</p></div> <div class="paragraph"><p>Given two arguments, creates or updates a symbolic ref <name> to point at the given branch <ref>.</p></div> <div class="paragraph"><p>A symbolic ref is a regular file that stores a string that begins with <tt>ref: refs/</tt>. For example, your <tt>.git/HEAD</tt> is a regular file whose contents is <tt>ref: refs/heads/master</tt>.</p></div> </div> <h2 id="_options">OPTIONS</h2> <div class="sectionbody"> <div class="dlist"><dl> <dt class="hdlist1"> -q </dt> <dt class="hdlist1"> --quiet </dt> <dd> <p> Do not issue an error message if the <name> is not a symbolic ref but a detached HEAD; instead exit with non-zero status silently. </p> </dd> <dt class="hdlist1"> -m </dt> <dd> <p> Update the reflog for <name> with <reason>. This is valid only when creating or updating a symbolic ref. </p> </dd> </dl></div> </div> <h2 id="_notes">NOTES</h2> <div class="sectionbody"> <div class="paragraph"><p>In the past, <tt>.git/HEAD</tt> was a symbolic link pointing at <tt>refs/heads/master</tt>. When we wanted to switch to another branch, we did <tt>ln -sf refs/heads/newbranch .git/HEAD</tt>, and when we wanted to find out which branch we are on, we did <tt>readlink .git/HEAD</tt>. This was fine, and internally that is what still happens by default, but on platforms that do not have working symlinks, or that do not have the <tt>readlink(1)</tt> command, this was a bit cumbersome. On some platforms, <tt>ln -sf</tt> does not even work as advertised (horrors). Therefore symbolic links are now deprecated and symbolic refs are used by default.</p></div> <div class="paragraph"><p><em>git symbolic-ref</em> will exit with status 0 if the contents of the symbolic ref were printed correctly, with status 1 if the requested name is not a symbolic ref, or 128 if another error occurs.</p></div> </div> <h2 id="_author">Author</h2> <div class="sectionbody"> <div class="paragraph"><p>Written by Junio C Hamano <<a href="mailto:gitster@pobox.com">gitster@pobox.com</a>></p></div> </div> <h2 id="_git">GIT</h2> <div class="sectionbody"> <div class="paragraph"><p>Part of the <a href="git.html">git(1)</a> suite</p></div> </div> <div id="footer"> <div id="footer-text"> Last updated 2010-12-16 02:52:11 UTC </div> </div> </body> </html>