What does the caret (^) character mean in Git?

Question

I saw an answer to a question here that helps restore a deleted file in git.

The solution was

git checkout <deleting_commit>^ -- <deleted_file_path>

What does the caret character (^) do? I’ve seen it elsewhere doing very useful things in git. It’s magical. Someone please spoil it for me and tell me what it does?

FYI on windows: ^ doesn't work as expected in DOS shell. Use git bash shell and then it works. — Cincinnati Joe, Sep 27 '11 at 00:59
That didn't even occur to me when I've attempted to use it (guessing on what it means). The caret (`^`) is the escape character in cmd.exe. Every time I've tried to use it to see if it would be helpful I was actually passing nothing, which explains why the results were never different. >_> Stupid cmd.exe. You can escape it by doubling it or quoting it: `git log master^^` or `git log "master^"` — bambams, Jul 24 '12 at 20:24

score 171 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 12 '21 at 10:59

171

HEAD^ means the first parent of the tip of the current branch.

Remember that git commits can have more than one parent. HEAD^ is short for HEAD^1, and you can also address HEAD^2 and so on as appropriate.

You can get to parents of any commit, not just HEAD. You can also move back through generations: for example, master~2 means the grandparent of the tip of the master branch, favoring the first parent in cases of ambiguity. These specifiers can be chained arbitrarily , e.g., topic~3^2. See related answer to What’s the difference between HEAD^ and HEAD~ in Git?

For the full details, see the “Specifying Revisions” section of git rev-parse --help.

edited Jun 12 '21 at 10:59

Cara McCormack

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answered Dec 24 '09 at 00:14

Greg Bacon

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But then, on linear history, why does `HEAD^^^` return the third older commit i.e. it is equivalent to `HEAD~~~`? – Vorac May 10 '14 at 12:37
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@Vorac For linear history, yes. – Greg Bacon May 10 '14 at 16:57

score 26 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 23 '09 at 23:56

It means "parent of". So HEAD^ means "the parent of the current HEAD". You can even chain them together: HEAD^^ means "the parent of the parent of the current HEAD" (i.e., the grandparent of the current HEAD), HEAD^^^ means "the parent of the parent of the parent of the current HEAD", and so forth.

cmcginty · Answer 3 · 2017-01-05T00:09:17.190

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The ^ (caret) can also be used when specifying ranges.

To exclude commits reachable from a commit, a prefix ^ notation is used. E.g. ^r1 r2 means commits reachable from r2 but exclude the ones reachable from r1.

<rev>

Include commits that are reachable from (i.e. ancestors of) .

^<rev>

Exclude commits that are reachable from (i.e. ancestors of) .

edited Jan 05 '17 at 00:09

answered Mar 04 '16 at 23:32

cmcginty

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yep, this was exactly what I was searching for. – Lajos Aug 30 '21 at 17:19

cdosborn · Answer 4 · 2019-07-05T18:34:28.370

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Here's a visual explanation. Suppose you have a history like so:

                      master  
  ... <- B <- C <- D
             /
... <- E <- F
              feature

When feature was merged into master, C was created with two ancestors. Git assigns these ancestors numbers. The mainline ancestor B is assigned 1 and the feature ancestor F is assigned 2.

Thus C^1 refers to B and C^2 refers to F. C^ is an alias for C^1.

You would only ever use <rev>^3. if you had performed a merge of three branches.

edited Jul 05 '19 at 18:34

answered Jan 20 '17 at 22:37

cdosborn

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is that actually legal? can a merge commit contain three parents? – matthias_buehlmann Feb 08 '21 at 15:41
A merge commit can have N parents. The only distinction between a regular commit and a merge is the number of parents. – cdosborn Feb 08 '21 at 17:49

score 8 · Answer 5 · answered Dec 23 '09 at 23:55

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The caret refers to the parent of a particular commit. E.g. HEAD^ refers to the parent of the current HEAD commmit. (also, HEAD^^ refers to the grandparent).

answered Dec 23 '09 at 23:55

mopoke

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score 5 · Answer 6 · answered Dec 23 '09 at 23:56

5

The carat represents a commit offset (parent). So for instance, HEAD^ means "one commit from HEAD" and HEAD^^^ means "three commits from HEAD".

answered Dec 23 '09 at 23:56

Amber

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score 4 · Answer 7 · answered Dec 23 '09 at 23:57

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The (^) gets the parent source of the command i.e. HEAD^ will get the parent of HEAD.

answered Dec 23 '09 at 23:57

TALLBOY

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score 1 · Answer 8 · edited Oct 24 '17 at 14:14

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Greg Bacon gave a great link, but it's pretty dense. The Git introductory docs online also introduce revision and range specifiers:

https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Revision-Selection

edited Oct 24 '17 at 14:14

Pod

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answered Nov 30 '12 at 01:53

Ncat

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This link might be closer to the location intended. http://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Revision-Selection#Ancestry-References – bholben Nov 07 '14 at 02:12

score 0 · Answer 9 · answered May 30 '22 at 08:55

OP: What does the caret (^) character mean in Git?

The ^ (Caret) and ~ (Tilde) selectors

The difference between HEAD^ (Caret) and HEAD~ (Tilde) is how they traverse history backwards from a specified starting point, in this particular case HEAD.

Tilde ~

<rev>~[<n>] = select <n>th generation ancestor, following only first* parents

Caret ^

<rev>^[<n>] = select <n>th parent of first generation ancestors

*First parent is always the left hand side of the merge, e.g. the commit on the branch that got merged into.

Joining ~ and ^ together

As seen in the illustration below the two selectors ~ and ^ can be used in combination. Also note that instead of using HEAD as a starting point, any regular reference can be used such as a branch, tag or even a commit hash.

Further more, depending on what ancestor is intended to be selected ^ and ~ can be used interchangeably as seen below in the table.

Source: A thorough rundown can be found in this blog post on the subject.

What does the caret (^) character mean in Git?

9 Answers9

The ^ (Caret) and ~ (Tilde) selectors

Tilde ~

Caret ^

Joining ~ and ^ together

Linked

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