til/git/find-the-initial-commit.md

Find The Initial Commit

By definition, the initial commit in a repository has no parents. You can exploit that fact and use rev-list to find the initial commit; a commit with no parents.

$ git rev-list --max-parents=0 HEAD

The rev-list command lists all commits in reverse chronological order. By restricting them to those with at most 0 parents, you are only going to get root commits. Generally, a repository will only have a single root commit, but it is possible for there to be more than one.

See man git-rev-list for more details.

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