How to get the parents of a merge commit in git?
Simple git log <hash>
called for a merge commit shows abbreviated hashes of its parents:
$ git log -1 395f65d
commit 395f65d438b13fb1fded88a330dc06c3b0951046
Merge: 9901923 d28790d
...
git
outputs parents according to their number: the first (leftmost) hash is for the first parent, and so on.
If all you want is just the hashes, the two equivalent choices are:
$ git log --pretty=%P -n 1 <commit>
$ git show -s --pretty=%P <commit>
git rev-list
can also show the parents' hashes, though it will first list the hash for a commit:
$ git rev-list --parents -n 1 <commit>
If you want to examine the parents, you can refer to them directly with carats as <commit>^1
and <commit>^2
, e.g.:
git show <commit>^1
This does generalize; for an octopus merge you can refer to the nth parent as <commit>^n
. You can refer to all parents with <commit>^@
, though this doesn't work when a single commit is required. Additional suffixes can appear after the nth parent syntax (e.g. <commit>^2^
, <commit>^2^@
), whereas they cannot after ^@
(<commit>^@^
isn't valid). For more on this syntax, read the rev-parse
man page.
The following is the simplest way I've found to view the parents of a merge
git show --pretty=raw 3706454