In Git, is there a way to get the "friendly" name for an arbitrary commit?

Question

In Git, there are numerous ways to refer to a commit, including the full SHA hash or a shortened form of the hash (say, the first 6 characters or so). You can also name commits using a "friendly" syntax, like HEAD, HEAD^, HEAD^^, HEAD~3, and so on.

Given an arbitrary commit in SHA hash form, is there a tool in Git to find a "friendly" name for said commit?

If I use git-show-branch, I get a list of revisions in "friendly" form, so I feel like there must be a way...I just can't find a tool to do it.

Answer 1

You can use "git name-rev" to get the form you are asking about. One problem with that form is that, being relative to a branch, it isn't a permanent name. So an alternative is "git describe" which produces an alternative friendly name based on how far ahead of a tag a given commit is.

For example:

srh@devo16:~/src/git <master>$ git name-rev 3cd7388
3cd7388 master~2

But then after I do a "git pull", master~2 could mean something else. By contrast:

srh@devo16:~/src/git <master>$ git describe 3cd7388
v1.6.3.1-153-g3cd7388

Now "v1.6.3.1-153-g3cd7388" is a permanent name. Of course, it's still a bit long (although you can shorten the hash bit on the end by specifying "--abbrev=4" for example) but it communicates that 3cd7388 is 153 changes after version 1.6.3.1.