How can I quickly check the value of ORIG_HEAD?

Question

I would just like to echo the value of ORIG_HEAD at the command line -- how can I do this? To no avail I tried:

$ echo $ORIG_HEAD

and

$ git echo $ORIG_HEAD

Answer 1

You can see what commit ORIG_HEAD points to by using the log command of git:

git log -1 ORIG_HEAD

---

What you tried, $ORIG_HEAD is parsed by your shell, treating it as a variable that was probably not set so effectively running

echo
git echo

Where git echo is an invalid git command.