What is the difference from HEAD, HEAD^, and HEAD~1?

Question

In git, what is the difference between the following?

HEAD
HEAD^
HEAD~1
HEAD~2

And how do they relate to master? So is there a MASTER^, MASTER~1??

Please refer to the syntax reference at, for example, http://jk.gs/gitrevisions.html — Jan Krüger, Jan 06 '14 at 16:34
you can find info here http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2221658/whats-the-difference-between-head-and-head-in-git — Robert, Jan 06 '14 at 17:05
Possible duplicate of [What's the difference between HEAD^ and HEAD~ in Git?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2221658/whats-the-difference-between-head-and-head-in-git) — NoDataDumpNoContribution, May 16 '18 at 19:59

score 26 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 06 '14 at 16:49

HEAD is a synonym for the most recent commit on your current branch, whatever it is.

HEAD^ (or HEAD^1) means the first parent of HEAD. A merge commit has multiple parents, so HEAD^2 refers to the second immediate parent of HEAD that was involved in the merge that created HEAD.

HEAD~1 is the same as HEAD~. In this case, it is synonymous with HEAD^. To see the difference, consider that HEAD~2 is the grandparent of HEAD. Using ~ goes back generations.

If you happen to be on the master branch, then HEAD refers to master. If you are on branch topic/foo, then it refers to that branch while you are on it.

Case matters with git. MASTER^ or MASTER~1 is likely to produce errors of the form

fatal: ambiguous argument 'MASTER~1': unknown revision or path not
in the working tree.

But master^ and master~1 are meaningful.

See the git rev-parse documentation for full details of the many ways you can address commits.

What is the difference from HEAD, HEAD^, and HEAD~1?

1 Answers1