Why is “origin/HEAD” shown when running “git branch -r”?

Question

When you run git branch -r why the blazes does it list origin/HEAD? For example, there\'s a remote repo on GitHub, say, with two branches: master a

Answer 1

The reason a bare repository can have a HEAD, is that because it determines which branch is initially checked out after a clone of the repository.

Normally, HEAD points to master, and that is the branch that is checked out when people clone the repository. Setting it to another branch (by editing HEAD in the bare repository) results in that branch being checked out on clone.