Finding a branch point with Git?

Question

I have a repository with branches master and A and lots of merge activity between the two. How can I find the commit in my repository when branch A was created based on mast

Answer 1

I seem to be getting some joy with

git rev-list branch...master

The last line you get is the first commit on the branch, so then it's a matter of getting the parent of that. So

git rev-list -1 `git rev-list branch...master | tail -1`^

Seems to work for me and doesn't need diffs and so on (which is helpful as we don't have that version of diff)

Correction: This doesn't work if you are on the master branch, but I'm doing this in a script so that's less of an issue