git - how to get default branch?

Question

My team alternates between usage of dev and master as default branch for several repos and I would like to write a script that checks for the default branch when entering a

Answer 1

This works for me with Git 2.1.10, using a repository cloned from GitHub:

git branch -r --points-at refs/remotes/origin/HEAD

A major problem with this approach is that it lists every remote branch pointing to HEAD; however, the output includes a hint:

  origin/HEAD -> origin/master
  origin/master
  origin/test123

So you can post-process the output with grep or similar to find the one with the arrow:

git branch -r --points-at refs/remotes/origin/HEAD | grep '\->' | cut -d' ' -f5 | cut -d/ -f2