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404 <div id="header">
405 <h1>
406 git-update-ref(1) Manual Page
407 </h1>
408 <h2>NAME</h2>
409 <div class="sectionbody">
410 <p>git-update-ref -
411 Update the object name stored in a ref safely
412 </p>
413 </div>
414 </div>
415 <h2 id="_synopsis">SYNOPSIS</h2>
416 <div class="sectionbody">
417 <div class="paragraph"><p><em>git update-ref</em> [-m &lt;reason&gt;] (-d &lt;ref&gt; [&lt;oldvalue&gt;] | [--no-deref] &lt;ref&gt; &lt;newvalue&gt; [&lt;oldvalue&gt;])</p></div>
418 </div>
419 <h2 id="_description">DESCRIPTION</h2>
420 <div class="sectionbody">
421 <div class="paragraph"><p>Given two arguments, stores the &lt;newvalue&gt; in the &lt;ref&gt;, possibly
422 dereferencing the symbolic refs. E.g. <tt>git update-ref HEAD
423 &lt;newvalue&gt;</tt> updates the current branch head to the new object.</p></div>
424 <div class="paragraph"><p>Given three arguments, stores the &lt;newvalue&gt; in the &lt;ref&gt;,
425 possibly dereferencing the symbolic refs, after verifying that
426 the current value of the &lt;ref&gt; matches &lt;oldvalue&gt;.
427 E.g. <tt>git update-ref refs/heads/master &lt;newvalue&gt; &lt;oldvalue&gt;</tt>
428 updates the master branch head to &lt;newvalue&gt; only if its current
429 value is &lt;oldvalue&gt;. You can specify 40 "0" or an empty string
430 as &lt;oldvalue&gt; to make sure that the ref you are creating does
431 not exist.</p></div>
432 <div class="paragraph"><p>It also allows a "ref" file to be a symbolic pointer to another
433 ref file by starting with the four-byte header sequence of
434 "ref:".</p></div>
435 <div class="paragraph"><p>More importantly, it allows the update of a ref file to follow
436 these symbolic pointers, whether they are symlinks or these
437 "regular file symbolic refs". It follows <strong>real</strong> symlinks only
438 if they start with "refs/": otherwise it will just try to read
439 them and update them as a regular file (i.e. it will allow the
440 filesystem to follow them, but will overwrite such a symlink to
441 somewhere else with a regular filename).</p></div>
442 <div class="paragraph"><p>If --no-deref is given, &lt;ref&gt; itself is overwritten, rather than
443 the result of following the symbolic pointers.</p></div>
444 <div class="paragraph"><p>In general, using</p></div>
445 <div class="literalblock">
446 <div class="content">
447 <pre><tt>git update-ref HEAD "$head"</tt></pre>
448 </div></div>
449 <div class="paragraph"><p>should be a <em>lot</em> safer than doing</p></div>
450 <div class="literalblock">
451 <div class="content">
452 <pre><tt>echo "$head" &gt; "$GIT_DIR/HEAD"</tt></pre>
453 </div></div>
454 <div class="paragraph"><p>both from a symlink following standpoint <strong>and</strong> an error checking
455 standpoint. The "refs/" rule for symlinks means that symlinks
456 that point to "outside" the tree are safe: they&#8217;ll be followed
457 for reading but not for writing (so we&#8217;ll never write through a
458 ref symlink to some other tree, if you have copied a whole
459 archive by creating a symlink tree).</p></div>
460 <div class="paragraph"><p>With <tt>-d</tt> flag, it deletes the named &lt;ref&gt; after verifying it
461 still contains &lt;oldvalue&gt;.</p></div>
462 </div>
463 <h2 id="_logging_updates">Logging Updates</h2>
464 <div class="sectionbody">
465 <div class="paragraph"><p>If config parameter "core.logAllRefUpdates" is true or the file
466 "$GIT_DIR/logs/&lt;ref&gt;" exists then <tt>git update-ref</tt> will append
467 a line to the log file "$GIT_DIR/logs/&lt;ref&gt;" (dereferencing all
468 symbolic refs before creating the log name) describing the change
469 in ref value. Log lines are formatted as:</p></div>
470 <div class="olist arabic"><ol class="arabic">
471 <li>
473 oldsha1 SP newsha1 SP committer LF
474 </p>
475 <div class="paragraph"><p>Where "oldsha1" is the 40 character hexadecimal value previously
476 stored in &lt;ref&gt;, "newsha1" is the 40 character hexadecimal value of
477 &lt;newvalue&gt; and "committer" is the committer&#8217;s name, email address
478 and date in the standard GIT committer ident format.</p></div>
479 </li>
480 </ol></div>
481 <div class="paragraph"><p>Optionally with -m:</p></div>
482 <div class="olist arabic"><ol class="arabic">
483 <li>
485 oldsha1 SP newsha1 SP committer TAB message LF
486 </p>
487 <div class="paragraph"><p>Where all fields are as described above and "message" is the
488 value supplied to the -m option.</p></div>
489 </li>
490 </ol></div>
491 <div class="paragraph"><p>An update will fail (without changing &lt;ref&gt;) if the current user is
492 unable to create a new log file, append to the existing log file
493 or does not have committer information available.</p></div>
494 </div>
495 <h2 id="_git">GIT</h2>
496 <div class="sectionbody">
497 <div class="paragraph"><p>Part of the <a href="git.html">git(1)</a> suite</p></div>
498 </div>
499 <div id="footer">
500 <div id="footer-text">
501 Last updated 2011-03-15 23:30:14 UTC
502 </div>
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