What does the caret (^) character mean?

Question

I saw an answer to a question here that helps restore a deleted file in git.

The solution was

git checkout ^ -- 

        

Answer 1

Here's a visual explanation. Suppose you have a history like so:

                      master  
  ... <- B <- C <- D
             /
... <- E <- F
              feature

When feature was merged into master, C was created with two ancestors. Git assigns these ancestors numbers. The mainline ancestor B is assigned 1 and the feature ancestor F is assigned 2.

Thus C^1 refers to B and C^2 refers to F. C^ is an alias for C^1.

You would only ever use ^3. if you had performed a merge of three branches.