On Thu, Jul 03, 2008 at 12:15:37PM +0930, Geoff Russell wrote: > >> Is there something that says "since repository creation", ie., go back as far > >> as possible, but no further? Is there a symbolic name for the initial commit? > > > > There's no symbolic name for it, since there might not be only one initial > > commit. git.git for example has at least three root commits. You will > > probably get what you want with $(git rev-list HEAD|tail -1). If your > > history is very large, $(git rev-list --reverse HEAD|head -1) is slightly > > faster, but usually not enough to offset typing --reverse :). > > Thanks for this, but I'm a little confused. > > If I do a "git init", there must be a first commit after this? Isn't > this the first commit, how > can there be more than one first commit? The confusing part is that you two are talking about two slightly different things. If you define "initial commit" as "the commit which has no parents" then there can be many (you get a new one anytime you merge in a project with unrelated history). However, what Geoff originally mentioned was HEAD{'7 days ago'}, which actually looks in the reflog. So if you define "initial commit" as "the first commit value that this ref ever had" then there is only one (though of course, your reflog will eventually expire, so it won't be "the oldest value this ref ever had" but rather "the oldest one the reflog ever remembers it having"). -Peff -- 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