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Get name of main branch in Git ​

This will get you just the name of the main branch on origin:

shell
$ basename "$(git symbolic-ref refs/remotes/origin/HEAD)"
main

git symbolic-ref given a single argument (in this case refs/remotes/origin/HEAD) will return the branch head which the symbolic ref refers to.

The HEAD of the origin sits on the main branch, whatever that is.

On its own, this outputs refs/remotes/origin/main. So we use basename to strip all before the last /.

See git-symbolic-ref Documentation See this Stack Overflow answer See basename on Wikipedia