Git branching: master vs. origin/master vs. remotes/origin/master

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Take a clone of a remote repository and run git branch -a (to show all the branches git knows about). It will probably look something like this:

* master
  remotes/origin/HEAD -> origin/master
  remotes/origin/master

Here, master is a branch in the local repository. remotes/origin/master is a branch named master on the remote named origin. You can refer to this as either origin/master, as in:

git diff origin/master..master

You can also refer to it as remotes/origin/master:

git diff remotes/origin/master..master

These are just two different ways of referring to the same thing (incidentally, both of these commands mean “show me the changes between the remote master branch and my master branch).

remotes/origin/HEAD is the default branch for the remote named origin. This lets you simply say origin instead of origin/master.

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