Given the name of a branch, which might be in either refs/heads or refs/remotes, how do I spell a query to obtain the HEAD commit of the refs/heads instance if it exists, else of the refs/remotes instance? If the branch is local, I can get the hash of its HEAD commit using git rev-parse: $ git rev-parse master 23eba8be773637c1a995a3ffe3aeabe921edef76 However, if I try to do the same thing with a remote branch, rev-parse barfs: $ git rev-parse r5.0.1 r5.0.1 fatal: ambiguous argument 'r5.0.1': unknown revision or path not in the working tree. Use '--' to separate paths from revisions It works if I explicitly specify that I want the remote instance: $ git rev-parse origin/r5.0.1 bb193a818fc984adbfd631951f3c89c16d5d3476 and the reference is, in fact, not ambiguous: $ git for-each-ref --format "%(refname)" | grep '/r5\.0\.1$' refs/remotes/origin/r5.0.1 Interestingly, master -- the one that works -- _is_ ambiguous: $ git for-each-ref --format "%(refname)" | grep '/master$' refs/heads/master refs/remotes/origin/master Unfortunately grep is not a usable solution in general because the branch name may contain . characters which grep (and egrep) treat specially; nor is fgrep because it does _not_ treat $ specially; and I haven't found a for-each-ref pattern that will select what I want. One approach would be "git checkout r5.0.1" followed by "git rev-parse HEAD", but I really don't want to perform a checkout (e.g. the working tree is not necessarily clean). I just want the same "resolve this reference" logic that checkout clearly has to be using, but as a pure query that does not change the state of either the repo or the working tree. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html