Reset to the very first commit in Git?

Question

Is there anything equivalent to the --root flag in the rebase command for the reset command?

git reset --root

Say I want to reset to the very first commit in my current branch: do I have to manually dig through the history and find the hash of that commit, or is there a simple way to reset to the first available commit?

Answer 1

A root commit (there can be more than one) is a commit with no parents.

This finds the root commit of the current commit (basically, "root of current branch" except that it works even with a detached HEAD):

git rev-list --max-parents=0 HEAD

This finds all root commits on all branches:

git rev-list --max-parents=0 --branches

and of course you can use --tags or --all instead of --branches.

Usually there's only one root in a repository so that all of these find the same revision, and rev-list prints revisions in a suitable order by default, so manojlds' answer will generally also work.

Edit: and of course, you have to provide the resulting SHA-1 to git reset.