Does the message “Successfully rebased and updated refs/heads/master ” always get displayed?

Question

I worked on the master branch and tried this git rebase -i HEAD~3. I actually tried to delete a commit from commit history but realized there was no need for that.

After the nano editor opened I made no changes to the file and closed it without saving. However, a message was displayed in the command line stating: "Successfully rebased and updated refs/heads/master ". What does that mean? I didn´t (as far as I know) do any changes. When I looked at git log and git status I saw no changes.

Afterwards, I made a couple of commits and pushed them to the remote.

My question is: Why was the message displayed? Did anything actually change?

I am asking this because this is actually a shared project and I was about to do a major mistake with rebasing something and now I am worried that I might´ve done so. As you can probably tell I am quite a n00b with git :)

Thank you for your help!

Answer 1

In this case, actually, nothing happened, everything it did result in the original commits.

So when it says "updated refs/heads/master" that means it changed the name master from identifying commit X to identifying commit X (for some hash ID X). It erased the older entry and replaced it with an absolutely identical entry. So nothing actually changed.

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