From the course: Git: Branches, Merges, and Remotes
Join today to access over 22,600 courses taught by industry experts or purchase this course individually.
Ancestry
- [Instructor] In this movie, we'll continue our discussion of how you can reference commits in Git by talking about ancestry. If you remember, when we make commits, they form a long chain and every commit links to the commit that comes before it. So most commits are going to have a parent commit, a grandparent commit, and even a great-grandparent commit. That's what we're talking about when we say ancestry. Let's start by talking about how you can refer to the parent commit. It's very easy. All you do is take a reference to a commit and then add a caret symbol after it. That's that upward-pointing arrow on your keyboard. You may not use it very often, but it's useful here. It's a symbol to tell us that we want to take this commit and then go to its parent commit, the one that comes right before it in the chain. And we can do this with any kind of commit, an identifier. For example, we can use head. head followed by the caret sign says get the parent of the head commit, not the head…
Practice while you learn with exercise files
Download the files the instructor uses to teach the course. Follow along and learn by watching, listening and practicing.
Download courses and learn on the go
Watch courses on your mobile device without an internet connection. Download courses using your iOS or Android LinkedIn Learning app.