Showing git tag message

Question

So,

If I do this:

 git tag -a v4.2 -m 'my message'

And then I run:

git show v4.2

Insead of seeing 'my message', I see the message of the last commit.

How can I see the message of that tag?

Answer 1

From the git show documentation:

For tags, it shows the tag message and the referenced objects.

So what you've described should work fine. Here's a complete example:

$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/carl/Desktop/example/.git/
$ touch file
$ git add file
$ git commit -m "added a file"
[master (root-commit) 198fa55] added a file
 1 file changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 file
$ git tag -a sometag -m "tag message"
$ git show sometag
tag sometag
Tagger: Carl Norum <somebody@somewhere>
Date:   Mon Jul 8 10:10:49 2013 -0700

tag message

commit 198fa55868770ab78786e704dbb290cbeefac011
Author: Carl Norum <somebody@somewhere>
Date:   Mon Jul 8 10:10:42 2013 -0700

    added a file

diff --git a/file b/file
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e69de29

Answer 2

You need to use the -n option with either 'git -l' or 'git tag'. This will show all tags with (the first line of) their messages:

git tag -n

-n takes an optional number of lines of the annotation to display, it defaults to one. From the git tag reference:

-n<num>

<num> specifies how many lines from the annotation, if any, are printed when using -l. Implies --list.

The default is not to print any annotation lines. If no number is given to -n, only the first line is printed. If the tag is not annotated, the commit message is displayed instead.