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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | NOTES | SEE ALSO | GIT | COLOPHON |
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GIT-SYMBOLIC-REF(1) Git Manual GIT-SYMBOLIC-REF(1)
git-symbolic-ref - Read, modify and delete symbolic refs
git symbolic-ref [-m <reason>] <name> <ref>
git symbolic-ref [-q] [--short] [--no-recurse] <name>
git symbolic-ref --delete [-q] <name>
Given one argument, reads which branch head the given symbolic ref
refers to and outputs its path, relative to the .git/ directory.
Typically you would give HEAD as the <name> argument to see which
branch your working tree is on.
Given two arguments, creates or updates a symbolic ref <name> to
point at the given branch <ref>.
Given --delete and an additional argument, deletes the given
symbolic ref.
A symbolic ref is a regular file that stores a string that begins
with ref: refs/. For example, your .git/HEAD is a regular file
whose content is ref: refs/heads/master.
-d, --delete
Delete the symbolic ref <name>.
-q, --quiet
Do not issue an error message if the <name> is not a symbolic
ref but a detached HEAD; instead exit with non-zero status
silently.
--short
When showing the value of <name> as a symbolic ref, try to
shorten the value, e.g. from refs/heads/master to master.
--recurse, --no-recurse
When showing the value of <name> as a symbolic ref, if <name>
refers to another symbolic ref, follow such a chain of
symbolic refs until the result no longer points at a symbolic
ref (--recurse, which is the default). --no-recurse stops
after dereferencing only a single level of symbolic ref.
-m
Update the reflog for <name> with <reason>. This is valid only
when creating or updating a symbolic ref.
In the past, .git/HEAD was a symbolic link pointing at
refs/heads/master. When we wanted to switch to another branch, we
did ln -sf refs/heads/newbranch .git/HEAD, and when we wanted to
find out which branch we are on, we did readlink .git/HEAD. But
symbolic links are not entirely portable, so they are now
deprecated and symbolic refs (as described above) are used by
default.
git symbolic-ref will exit with status 0 if the contents of the
symbolic ref were printed correctly, with status 1 if the
requested name is not a symbolic ref, or 128 if another error
occurs.
git-update-ref(1)
Part of the git(1) suite
This page is part of the git (Git distributed version control
system) project. Information about the project can be found at
⟨http://git-scm.com/⟩. If you have a bug report for this manual
page, see ⟨http://git-scm.com/community⟩. This page was obtained
from the project's upstream Git repository
⟨https://github.com/git/git.git⟩ on 2025-08-11. (At that time,
the date of the most recent commit that was found in the
repository was 2025-08-07.) If you discover any rendering
problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there is
a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
(which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
man-pages@man7.org
Git 2.51.0.rc1 2025-08-07 GIT-SYMBOLIC-REF(1)
Pages that refer to this page: git(1), git-update-ref(1), gitglossary(7)
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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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