What is the HEAD in git?

git head
e-satis picture e-satis · Mar 27, 2010 · Viewed 91.2k times · Source

There seems to be a difference between the last commit, the HEAD and the state of the file I can see in my directory.

What is HEAD, what can I do with it and what mistake should I avoid?

Answer

poke picture poke · Mar 27, 2010

HEAD is a reference to the last commit in the currently checked-out branch.

There is a small exception to this, which is the detached HEAD. A detached HEAD is the situation you end up in whenever you check out a commit (or tag) instead of a branch. In this case, you have to imagine this as a temporary branch without a name; so instead of having a named branch reference, we only have HEAD. It will still allow you to make commits (which will update HEAD), so the above short definition is still true if you think of a detached HEAD as a temporary branch without a name.

Related questions

How do I use 'git reset --hard HEAD' to revert to a previous commit?

I know that Git tracks changes I make to my application, and it holds on to them until I commit the changes, but here's where I'm hung up: When I want to revert to a previous commit I use: git …

Read More
Difference between HEAD and master

What is the difference between the HEAD and master in Git? I did a clone of a project on GitHub and want to push my changes to the remote. But to which one should I push?

Read More
Make git master HEAD point to current HEAD of branch

I have to admit that I haven't played with gits advanced features but on my current project I had to. The situation: Someone tried to implement some features and comitted them to the master, now I was called to do …

Read More