Using a caret(^) when using Git for Windows in PowerShell

Question

I'm using git at the command line with PowerShell, and I'm trying to use something like

git difftool HEAD^

Powershell seems to treat this as if I typed

git difftool HEAD

so the caret symbol is gone. If I use multiple copies of the caret, I get a weird error:

git difftool HEAD^^
fatal: ambiguous argument 'HEAD@set': unknown revision or path not in the working tree.
Use '--' to separate paths from revisions

Interestingly, using four carets in a row seems to escape down to one, so git difftool HEAD^^^^ works as I expect git difftool HEAD^ to work.

I've tried escaping the caret with single quotes, double quotes, grave accents, nothing seems to help.

Is this a feature of PowerShell, or is my setup wrong somewhere?

Answer 1

I found the problem, and it was with my setup :(

I'm using Git for Windows, which provides git.exe in a /bin folder and git.cmd in a /cmd folder. git.cmd is a batch script which wraps git.exe and does some other stuff.

Both of these directories were in my PATH, with /cmd coming first, so when I typed git, git.cmd was being run. Because this was a batch script the caret could not be used. In the cmd world a caret is escaped by typing two of them (^^).

I guess that this was somehow being required twice, so four carets would be escaped down to two, then one (I don't really understand this bit). I also don't understand the error message when two or three carets are used.

The Lesson Is...

Only use git.exe when using Git for Windows with PowerShell!

Answer 2

You might be able to use ~ instead of ^

git difftool HEAD~

Note that HEAD^^ is the same as HEAD~2