Pfthb

What goes on here? Why are the two outputs different?

$ git log --oneline -n1
7dbee6d (HEAD -> master, origin/master, origin/HEAD) some commit msg

$ git log --oneline -n1 | head
7dbee6d some commit msg

The piping to 'head' was the simplest example I could find to illustrate the problem. The problem prevents me from e.g.:

• Piping to a file including the git decoration


• Piping to "grep", e.g. to grep for certain tags

system:

• Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS


• git version 2.17.1


• GNU bash, version 4.4.19(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)

From the log manpage:

--decorate[=short|full|auto|no]

 Print out the ref names of any commits that are shown. If short is
 specified, the ref name prefixes refs/heads/, refs/tags/ and
 refs/remotes/ will not be printed. If full is specified, the full 
 ref name (including prefix) will be printed. If auto is specified,
 then if the output is going to a terminal, the ref names are shown
 as if short were given, otherwise no ref names are shown. 
 The default option is short.

So when called with --decorate=auto, the behavior will change depending whether stdout is a terminal or not. If you pipe git log output somewhere, stdout will not be a terminal.

The default is short, but you may have auto somewhere in your git options.

To get the same behavior in both cases, call it with --decorate=short