How to find the current git branch in detached HEAD state

Question

I can find the current git branch name by doing either of these:

git branch | awk \'/^\\*/ { print $2 }\'
git describe --contains --all HEAD

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Answer 1

Here's git nthlastcheckout, it gets the exact string you used for your nth last checkout from the reflog:

git config --global alias.nthlastcheckout '!nthlastcheckout'"() {
        git reflog |
        awk '\$3==\"checkout:\" {++n}
             n=='\${1-1}' {print \$NF; exit}
             END {exit n!='\${1-1}'}'
}; nthlastcheckout \"\$@\""

Examples:

$ git nthlastcheckout
master
$ git nthlastcheckout 2
v1.3.0^2