Where is my .git/refs/heads/master file

Question

I am following below article to get some idea of internals of git.

http://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Internals-Git-References

It says that git stores references to latest commit objects of each branch in .git/refs/heads directory.

In one of my git repositories, I found that there's nothing in .git/refs/heads directory. All other repositories I checked contain files for each branch in the repository.

This repository with empty .git/refs/heads actually has a master branch and it works perfectly.

Can someone explain why.git/refs/heads is empty and how git works without a problem in this condition?

Answer 1

Then there's going to be a file named .git/packed-refs there too. When repository histories start getting really long, having hundreds of tags starts to slow things down, so git pack-refs will put them all in the packed-refs file.

Yay for going after the internals, you're going to be floored by how simple it is. It's usually worthwhile reading whatever docs come with a tool, you're in repository layout and core commands territory, plus, see the "see also" links at the bottom. You should also be able to get those with git help, I hope there's no distribution that omits the docs.