References can validly contain forward slashes in their name. With the ref files backend, these are stored as a directory tree. This means when you look up a reference, you might find a directory where you expected a file. This causes the option --exists, recently added to git-show-ref(1), to return the following error: error: failed to look up reference: Is a directory Other backends, like reftables, might store refs with forward slashes differently. So they will not encounter the same error. To make the error consistent across refs backend implementations, and to be more clear to user, hide the error about having found a directory as a generic error: error: reference does not exist Toon Claes (1): builtin/show-ref: treat directory directory as non-existing in --exists builtin/show-ref.c | 2 +- t/t1403-show-ref.sh | 4 ++-- 2 files changed, 3 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) base-commit: a54a84b333adbecf7bc4483c0e36ed5878cac17b -- 2.42.1