Working with branches
Branches are symbolic names for lines of development. In Git, each branch is realized as a named pointer (reference) to some commit in the DAG of revisions, so it is called branch head.
Tip
The representation of branches in Git
Git uses currently two different on-disk representations of branches: the loose format and the packed format.
Take, for example, the master branch (which is the default name of a branch in Git; you start on this branch in the newly-created repository). In loose format (which takes precedence), it is represented as the one-line file, .git/refs/heads/master with textual hexadecimal representation of SHA-1 tip of the branch. In the packed format, it is represented as a line in the .git/packed-refs file, ...
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