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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | EXAMPLES | SEARCH STRATEGY | BUGS | GIT | COLOPHON |
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GIT-DESCRIBE(1) Git Manual GIT-DESCRIBE(1)
git-describe - Give an object a human readable name based on an
available ref
git describe [--all] [--tags] [--contains] [--abbrev=<n>] [<commit-ish>...]
git describe [--all] [--tags] [--contains] [--abbrev=<n>] --dirty[=<mark>]
git describe <blob>
The command finds the most recent tag that is reachable from a
commit. If the tag points to the commit, then only the tag is
shown. Otherwise, it suffixes the tag name with the number of
additional commits on top of the tagged object and the
abbreviated object name of the most recent commit. The result is
a "human-readable" object name which can also be used to identify
the commit to other git commands.
By default (without --all or --tags) git describe only shows
annotated tags. For more information about creating annotated
tags see the -a and -s options to git-tag(1).
If the given object refers to a blob, it will be described as
<commit-ish>:<path>, such that the blob can be found at <path> in
the <commit-ish>, which itself describes the first commit in
which this blob occurs in a reverse revision walk from HEAD.
<commit-ish>...
Commit-ish object names to describe. Defaults to HEAD if
omitted.
--dirty[=<mark>], --broken[=<mark>]
Describe the state of the working tree. When the working tree
matches HEAD, the output is the same as "git describe HEAD".
If the working tree has local modification "-dirty" is
appended to it. If a repository is corrupt and Git cannot
determine if there is local modification, Git will error out,
unless ‘--broken’ is given, which appends the suffix
"-broken" instead.
--all
Instead of using only the annotated tags, use any ref found
in refs/ namespace. This option enables matching any known
branch, remote-tracking branch, or lightweight tag.
--tags
Instead of using only the annotated tags, use any tag found
in refs/tags namespace. This option enables matching a
lightweight (non-annotated) tag.
--contains
Instead of finding the tag that predates the commit, find the
tag that comes after the commit, and thus contains it.
Automatically implies --tags.
--abbrev=<n>
Instead of using the default number of hexadecimal digits
(which will vary according to the number of objects in the
repository with a default of 7) of the abbreviated object
name, use <n> digits, or as many digits as needed to form a
unique object name. An <n> of 0 will suppress long format,
only showing the closest tag.
--candidates=<n>
Instead of considering only the 10 most recent tags as
candidates to describe the input commit-ish consider up to
<n> candidates. Increasing <n> above 10 will take slightly
longer but may produce a more accurate result. An <n> of 0
will cause only exact matches to be output.
--exact-match
Only output exact matches (a tag directly references the
supplied commit). This is a synonym for --candidates=0.
--debug
Verbosely display information about the searching strategy
being employed to standard error. The tag name will still be
printed to standard out.
--long
Always output the long format (the tag, the number of commits
and the abbreviated commit name) even when it matches a tag.
This is useful when you want to see parts of the commit
object name in "describe" output, even when the commit in
question happens to be a tagged version. Instead of just
emitting the tag name, it will describe such a commit as
v1.2-0-gdeadbee (0th commit since tag v1.2 that points at
object deadbee....).
--match <pattern>
Only consider tags matching the given glob(7) pattern,
excluding the "refs/tags/" prefix. If used with --all, it
also considers local branches and remote-tracking references
matching the pattern, excluding respectively "refs/heads/"
and "refs/remotes/" prefix; references of other types are
never considered. If given multiple times, a list of patterns
will be accumulated, and tags matching any of the patterns
will be considered. Use --no-match to clear and reset the
list of patterns.
--exclude <pattern>
Do not consider tags matching the given glob(7) pattern,
excluding the "refs/tags/" prefix. If used with --all, it
also does not consider local branches and remote-tracking
references matching the pattern, excluding respectively
"refs/heads/" and "refs/remotes/" prefix; references of other
types are never considered. If given multiple times, a list
of patterns will be accumulated and tags matching any of the
patterns will be excluded. When combined with --match a tag
will be considered when it matches at least one --match
pattern and does not match any of the --exclude patterns. Use
--no-exclude to clear and reset the list of patterns.
--always
Show uniquely abbreviated commit object as fallback.
--first-parent
Follow only the first parent commit upon seeing a merge
commit. This is useful when you wish to not match tags on
branches merged in the history of the target commit.
With something like git.git current tree, I get:
[torvalds@g5 git]$ git describe parent
v1.0.4-14-g2414721
i.e. the current head of my "parent" branch is based on v1.0.4,
but since it has a few commits on top of that, describe has added
the number of additional commits ("14") and an abbreviated object
name for the commit itself ("2414721") at the end.
The number of additional commits is the number of commits which
would be displayed by "git log v1.0.4..parent". The hash suffix
is "-g" + an unambiguous abbreviation for the tip commit of
parent (which was 2414721b194453f058079d897d13c4e377f92dc6). The
length of the abbreviation scales as the repository grows, using
the approximate number of objects in the repository and a bit of
math around the birthday paradox, and defaults to a minimum of 7.
The "g" prefix stands for "git" and is used to allow describing
the version of a software depending on the SCM the software is
managed with. This is useful in an environment where people may
use different SCMs.
Doing a git describe on a tag-name will just show the tag name:
[torvalds@g5 git]$ git describe v1.0.4
v1.0.4
With --all, the command can use branch heads as references, so
the output shows the reference path as well:
[torvalds@g5 git]$ git describe --all --abbrev=4 v1.0.5^2
tags/v1.0.0-21-g975b
[torvalds@g5 git]$ git describe --all --abbrev=4 HEAD^
heads/lt/describe-7-g975b
With --abbrev set to 0, the command can be used to find the
closest tagname without any suffix:
[torvalds@g5 git]$ git describe --abbrev=0 v1.0.5^2
tags/v1.0.0
Note that the suffix you get if you type these commands today may
be longer than what Linus saw above when he ran these commands,
as your Git repository may have new commits whose object names
begin with 975b that did not exist back then, and "-g975b" suffix
alone may not be sufficient to disambiguate these commits.
For each commit-ish supplied, git describe will first look for a
tag which tags exactly that commit. Annotated tags will always be
preferred over lightweight tags, and tags with newer dates will
always be preferred over tags with older dates. If an exact match
is found, its name will be output and searching will stop.
If an exact match was not found, git describe will walk back
through the commit history to locate an ancestor commit which has
been tagged. The ancestor’s tag will be output along with an
abbreviation of the input commit-ish’s SHA-1. If --first-parent
was specified then the walk will only consider the first parent
of each commit.
If multiple tags were found during the walk then the tag which
has the fewest commits different from the input commit-ish will
be selected and output. Here fewest commits different is defined
as the number of commits which would be shown by git log
tag..input will be the smallest number of commits possible.
Tree objects as well as tag objects not pointing at commits,
cannot be described. When describing blobs, the lightweight tags
pointing at blobs are ignored, but the blob is still described as
<commit-ish>:<path> despite the lightweight tag being favorable.
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 2024-06-14. (At that time,
the date of the most recent commit that was found in the
repository was 2024-06-12.) 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 2.45.2.492.gd63586 2024-06-12 GIT-DESCRIBE(1)
Pages that refer to this page: git(1), git-diff-tree(1), git-for-each-ref(1), git-log(1), git-rev-list(1), git-show(1)
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HTML rendering created 2024-06-26 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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