How to get the current branch name in Git?

Question

I\'m from a Subversion background and, when I had a branch, I knew what I was working on with \"These working files point to this branch\".

But with Git I\'m not sur

Answer 1

Sorry this is another command-line answer, but that's what I was looking for when I found this question and many of these answers were helpful. My solution is the following bash shell function:

get_branch () {
    git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD | grep -v HEAD || \
    git describe --exact-match HEAD 2> /dev/null || \
    git rev-parse HEAD
}

This should always give me something both human-readable and directly usable as an argument to git checkout.

• on a local branch: feature/HS-0001
• on a tagged commit (detached): v3.29.5
• on a remote branch (detached, not tagged): SHA1
• on any other detached commit: SHA1