The branch object is not really like any other Git objects; you can't print it using the cat-file command as we can with the others (if you specify the -p pretty print, you'll just get the commit object it points to), as shown in the following code:
$ git cat-file master usage: git cat-file (-t|-s|-e|-p|<type>|--textconv) <object> or: git cat-file (--batch|--batch-check) < <list_of_objects> <type> can be one of: blob, tree, commit, tag. ... $ git cat-file -p master tree 34fa038544bcd9aed660c08320214bafff94150b parent a90d1906337a6d75f1dc32da647931f932500d83 ...
Instead, we can take a look at the branch inside the .git folder where the whole Git repository is stored. If we open the text file .git/refs/heads/master, we can ...