How to detect if a branch exists using git command? [duplicate]

Question

How to detect if a branch exists using git command?

Need this in some shell script

Answer 1

To check whether the string in the shell variable $REVISION correctly resolves to a valid object in git's database, you can use

git rev-parse --quiet --verify $REVISION

This will print the SHA1 to stdout if the revision is found, and return with a non-zero exit status otherwise, so you can use it in if clauses:

if git rev-parse --quiet --verify $REVISION > /dev/null; then
    # whatever
fi

Note that this will not only allow branch names in the strict sense, but all valid revision references.