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a8d05d72b9
The old "git symbolic-ref" manpage seemed to imply in one place that symlinks are still the default way to represent symbolic references and in another that symlinks are deprecated. Fix the text and shorten the justification for the change of implementation. Signed-off-by: Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
57 lines
1.6 KiB
Plaintext
57 lines
1.6 KiB
Plaintext
git-symbolic-ref(1)
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===================
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NAME
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----
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git-symbolic-ref - Read and modify symbolic refs
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SYNOPSIS
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--------
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[verse]
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'git symbolic-ref' [-q] [-m <reason>] <name> [<ref>]
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DESCRIPTION
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-----------
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Given one argument, reads which branch head the given symbolic
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ref refers to and outputs its path, relative to the `.git/`
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directory. Typically you would give `HEAD` as the <name>
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argument to see which branch your working tree is on.
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Given two arguments, creates or updates a symbolic ref <name> to
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point at the given branch <ref>.
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A symbolic ref is a regular file that stores a string that
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begins with `ref: refs/`. For example, your `.git/HEAD` is
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a regular file whose contents is `ref: refs/heads/master`.
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OPTIONS
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-------
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-q::
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--quiet::
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Do not issue an error message if the <name> is not a
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symbolic ref but a detached HEAD; instead exit with
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non-zero status silently.
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-m::
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Update the reflog for <name> with <reason>. This is valid only
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when creating or updating a symbolic ref.
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NOTES
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-----
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In the past, `.git/HEAD` was a symbolic link pointing at
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`refs/heads/master`. When we wanted to switch to another branch,
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we did `ln -sf refs/heads/newbranch .git/HEAD`, and when we wanted
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to find out which branch we are on, we did `readlink .git/HEAD`.
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But symbolic links are not entirely portable, so they are now
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deprecated and symbolic refs (as described above) are used by
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default.
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'git symbolic-ref' will exit with status 0 if the contents of the
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symbolic ref were printed correctly, with status 1 if the requested
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name is not a symbolic ref, or 128 if another error occurs.
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GIT
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---
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Part of the linkgit:git[1] suite
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