Why does my 'git branch' have no master?

Question

I'm a git newbie and I keep reading about a "master" branch. Is "master" just a conventional name that people used or does it have special meaning like HEAD?

When I do git branch on the clone that I have, I only see 1 single branch - the one I'm on. No "master" at all. If I type git checkout master (as I see in alot of tutorials or guides), I get

error: pathspec 'master' did not match any file(s) known to git. 

I'm just confused as to why my clone doesn't have a master that everyone seems to imply that it always exists.

Answer 1

To checkout a branch which does not exist locally but is in the remote repo you could use this command:

git checkout -t -b master origin/master 

Answer 2

Most Git repositories use master as the main (and default) branch - if you initialize a new Git repo via git init, it will have master checked out by default.

However, if you clone a repository, the default branch you have is whatever the remote's HEAD points to (HEAD is actually a symbolic ref that points to a branch name). So if the repository you cloned had a HEAD pointed to, say, foo, then your clone will just have a foo branch.

The remote you cloned from might still have a master branch (you could check with git ls-remote origin master), but you wouldn't have created a local version of that branch by default, because git clone only checks out the remote's HEAD.