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gitgit-tag

How to tell which commit a tag points to in Git?


I have a bunch of unannotated tags in the repository and I want to work out which commit they point to. Is there a command that that will just list the tags and their commit SHAs? Checking out the tag and looking at the HEAD seems a bit too laborious to me.

Update

I realized after I went through the responses that what I actually wanted was to simply look at the history leading up to the tag, for which git log <tagname> is sufficient.

The answer that is marked as answer is useful for getting a list of tags and their commits, which is what I asked. With a bit of shell hackery I'm sure it's possible to transform those into SHA+Commit message.


Solution

  • One way to do this would be with git rev-list. The following will output the commit to which a tag points:

    $ git rev-list -n 1 $TAG
    

    NOTE This works for both Annotated and Unannotated tags

    You could add it as an alias in ~/.gitconfig if you use it a lot:

    [alias]
      tagcommit = rev-list -n 1
    

    And then call it with:

    $ git tagcommit $TAG
    

    Possible pitfall: if you have a local checkout or a branch of the same tag name, this solution might get you "warning: refname 'myTag' is ambiguous". In that case, try increasing specificity, e.g.:

    $ git rev-list -n 1 tags/$TAG