How to get the tree of the current directory in Git

Question

In Git it's possible to get the tree of a sub-directory, say foo/ like this

git ls-tree -d HEAD foo

but suppose foo is the current directory, how does one get the tree of that directory?

The following

git ls-tree -d HEAD .

would list any trees in foo, but not the tree of foo.

The best approach I have found is

git ls-tree -d HEAD $PWD

but I wonder if there is way to do this without relying on the $PWD environment variable.

Answer 1

As commented, that would be:

git ls-tree -d HEAD $(pwd)

The $(pwd) command substitution will execute the pwd command, which prints the working directory, and substitute its output into the command. That way, you are not directly relying on the $PWD environment variable. However, this still involves obtaining the path of the current directory.

Another alternative is to use a combination of git rev-parse and git ls-tree commands. Here is how you could do it:

git ls-tree -d HEAD:$(git rev-parse --show-prefix)

The git rev-parse --show-prefix command returns the prefix (i.e., the path from the repository root to the current directory), which can then be used with the git ls-tree command to obtain the tree of the current directory.

Answer 2

If you pass -t the first line will be the tree of the current directory:

git ls-tree -dt HEAD | head -1

According to the man page, -d implies -t, but that does not seem to be the case.

-t

Show tree entries even when going to recurse them. Has no effect if -r was not passed. -d implies -t.