Is there a way to find the branching commit from the merge commit

Question

I'm looking for a git command (or set of commands) that can return the 'branching' commit from the merge commit.

For example, suppose I have the following tree:

A______B______C_______D________E________F
        \_________G___________/

Given the merge commit E, the command should return B.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1549146/git-find-the-most-recent-common-ancestor-of-two-branches — pkamb, Jul 21 '20 at 20:42

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 21 '20 at 20:38

The command you're looking for is git merge-base, it tells you what the most recent common ancestor there is for two commits.

To get the common ancestor for your E commit in your example, you would execute this command:

git merge-base E^1 E^2

where E would be whatever references the commit in question, like:

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