Get the short Git version hash

Is there a cleaner way to get the short version hash of HEAD from Git?

I want to see the same output as I get from:

 git log -n 1 | head -n 1 | sed -e 's/^commit //' | head -c 8

---

I originally used the above command to generate a version string, but this is even better:

git describe --tags

It will output strings like 0.1.12 (tagged commit) or 0.1.11-5-g0c85fbc (five commits after the tag).

Try this:

git rev-parse --short HEAD

The command git rev-parse can do a remarkable number of different things, so you'd need to go through the documentation very carefully to spot that though.

You can do just about any format you want with --pretty=format:

git log -1 --pretty=format:%h 

git log -1 --abbrev-commit

will also do it.

git log --abbrev-commit

will list the log entries with abbreviated SHA-1 checksum.

A simple way to see the Git commit short version and the Git commit message is:

git log --oneline

Note that this is shorthand for

git log --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit

A really simple way is to:

git describe --always

Branch with short hash and last comment:

git branch -v

  develop      717c2f9 [ahead 42] blabla
* master       2722bbe [ahead 1] bla

I have Git version 2.7.4 with the following settings:

git config --global log.abbrevcommit yes
git config --global core.abbrev 8

Now when I do:

git log --pretty=oneline

I get an abbreviated commit id of eight digits:

ed054a38 add project based .gitignore
30a3fa4c add ez version
0a6e9015 add logic for shifting days
af4ab954 add n days ago
...

what about this :

git log --pretty="%h %cD %cn %s"  

it shows someting like :

674cd0d Wed, 20 Nov 2019 12:15:38 +0000 Bob commit message

see the pretty format documentation