Why would a line's SHA in a git blame view have a leading caret (^)?

Question

I'm not sure if this behavior is bizarre, but here's what's happening: it seems if I run git blame on a file, any lines in that file that are from the initial commit have a SHA with a leading caret (^), like this

 ^bb65026 (Brian Danielak 2012-10-27 19:11:54 -0700 1) hello, world! bbcd4a96 (Brian Danielak 2012-10-27 19:11:54 -0700 2) hello again!

Steps to Reproduce

From a terminal prompt:

mkdir newProject cd newProject git init echo 'hello, world!' >> testFile.txt git add testFile.txt git commit -m "Initial Commit" git blame testFile.txt

Then verify your blame output has a leading caret, as mine did (though your SHA likely won't match)

^bb65026 (Brian Danielak 2012-10-27 19:11:54 -0700 1) hello, world!

As a test, you can try adding a second line to a file and re-committing, to see that only the hash of the first line contains a leading caret

echo 'hello again!' >> testFile.txt git add testFile.txt git commit -m "Initial Commit" git blame testFile.txt

My blame output now looks like this:

 ^bb65026 (Brian Danielak 2012-10-27 19:11:54 -0700 1) hello, world! bbcd4a96 (Brian Danielak 2012-10-27 19:11:54 -0700 2) hello again!

Can anyone explain why this happens, and whether I should have expected it? Does it only happen when a line comes from the first commit in a repo? If so, why?

btw - you can still do: git log bb65026 -p etc. (less the caret) and see those details. — SaminOz
– SaminOz, Commented Sep 1, 2016 at 20:16

galath · Accepted Answer · 2016-09-07 13:18:48Z

26

The docs for git blame actually do mention the caret as being used for a "boundary commit", which it looks like they're defining something like "the oldest commit in this blame range" -- in your case it's the project's initial commit, but with some different options you may have only blamed up to commits from 3 weeks ago.

edited Sep 7, 2016 at 13:18

galath

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answered Oct 28, 2012 at 2:48

Mark Rushakoff

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2 Comments

Philip Oakley Over a year ago

Could the man page describe this better? Is there a better place for the description of the 'caret' prefix?

Mark Rushakoff Over a year ago

@PhilipOakley Yes, the man page could definitely stand to be more clear about a boundary commit. A cursory search of 'git "boundary commit" on Google doesn't turn up anything more clear from the git man pages.

Robert Speicher · Accepted Answer · 2016-11-30 08:20:43Z

I ran into this issue suddenly in a very old repository and was confused by it.

The problem ended up being that I had somehow gotten a shallow clone at some point. A simple git fetch --unshallow remedied it.

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