How short can Git abbreviate? | Josh Stone

submited by

Style Pass

2024-04-23 06:30:03

How short can a Git hash be abbreviated? A full SHA-1 hash is 160 bits, 40 hex characters, which is a bit long to talk about and retype when you’re not just copy-pasting. Therefore most people will use just the first few characters to refer to commits, but how safe is this?

I know of a couple posts where Linus Torvalds laments Git’s default hash abbreviation of 7 characters. This gives you 28 unique bits, almost 270 million possibilities, which seems like it should be plenty. Even with the Linux kernel, one of the biggest repositories I know, there are fewer than 4 million objects. However, since hash functions like SHA-1 have approximately random distribution, you easily can and will run into the birthday problem at this level.

As Linus noted in that second link, Git will now make sure that the abbreviated hashes it prints are currently long enough to be unique, but that’s no guarantee against future collisions. He recommends kernel developers use 12 characters, which got me curious how to evaluate how much headroom this leaves for any given repository. One way to get a basic idea is to ask Git to abbreviate all commit objects as much as possible. For example, on linux.git: