git-merge – Accidents Happen https://ah.thameera.com In the dark Mon, 10 Sep 2012 15:22:22 +0000 en-US hourly 1 56521109 Who was my first parent? [Git] https://ah.thameera.com/who-was-my-first-parent-git/ https://ah.thameera.com/who-was-my-first-parent-git/#respond Mon, 10 Sep 2012 15:22:22 +0000 http://noisythameera.wordpress.com/?p=80 A co-worker of mine had the following tree structure in his git repository and he wanted to get rid of the 2abaf35 and 607f016 commits. The solution is a simple 

git reset --hard e5e67d0


But, for the sake of fun, I wanted to do it without referring to a SHA value. The HEAD commit has two parents e5e67d0 and 2abaf35. HEAD^ will refer to the first parent and HEAD^2 will refer to the second parent. But how do we know which parent is the first?

According to charon at #git on freenode, HEAD at the time of invoking the merge will always be the first parent. This is the left-most (straight line) branch. The remaining commits will be the remaining parents, in the order you specify. So, in this case, 

git reset --hard HEAD^

would have achieved the same feat.

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