HEAD~ vs HEAD^ vs HEAD@{} also known as tilde vs caret vs at sign

Question

HEAD is a pointer at the current branch. I have seen a variety of notations for ancestors of HEAD including

• HEAD~2
• HEAD^2
• HEAD@{2}
• HEAD~~
• HEAD^^

What does each of the above mean, exactly? Where is the documentation for this?

Answer 1

From the docs here.

• HEAD~2 : 2 commits older than HEAD
• HEAD^2 : the second parent of HEAD, if HEAD was a merge, otherwise illegal
• HEAD@{2} : refers to the 3rd listing in the overview of git reflog
• HEAD~~ : 2 commits older than HEAD
• HEAD^^ : 2 commits older than HEAD

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If HEAD was a merge, then

• first parent is the branch into which we merged,
• second parent is the branch we merged.

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Some Combinations and Synonyms

First Parent    First Grandparent    Second Parent    Second Grandparent  HEAD~ HEAD^ HEAD~1          HEAD~2               HEAD^2           HEAD^2~         HEAD^1          HEAD^^                                HEAD^2^  

Answer 2

git reference suffixes (^N, ~N, @{...})

ref~ is shorthand for ref~1 and means the commit's first parent. ref~2 means the commit's first parent's first parent. ref~3 means the commit's first parent's first parent's first parent. And so on.

ref^ is shorthand for ref^1 and means the commit's first parent. But where the two differ is that ref^2 means the commit's second parent (remember, commits can have two parents when they are a merge).

The ^ and ~ operators can be combined.

Here's a diagram showing how to reference various commits using HEAD as the starting point.

src