git plumbing to tell the checked out branch

Question

Scripting git, I need to find out the checked-out branch name. So far it seems the only "reliable" way to do that is with git branch | sed -n '/^\* /s///p'. (Scare quotes because of things like color.branch or column.branch in .gitconfig; it's not reliable at all.) The only other thing I found is git name-rev, but that seems to return the first (sorted by names) branch that points to HEAD:

> git checkout master
> git checkout -b another
> git checkout master
> git name-rev HEAD
HEAD another

Is there something better than sed -n '\#^ref: refs/heads/#s###p' .git/HEAD to figure out the checked out branch?

Answer 1

Just output the branch you are on with:

git rev-parse --symbolic-full-name --abbrev-ref HEAD

There should be no trouble also if you have more than one branches, and if you aren't on any branch it just gives you HEAD