Study guide question

Question

can someone define what HEAD and staging area are ?

Answer 1

HEAD refers to your local repo. So, between "<<<<<HEAD" and "====" is your changes whereas below "====" are changes that your teammates made.

for example, if you are working on App.java and made some changes in your working directory and "git add" the changes, the changes that you made is staged and goes to the staging area. furthermore, if you commit after, with all the changes, it creates a new node (new version) in your local repo.

Answer 2

About HEAD, I explained it here: https://lovelace.augustana.edu/q2a/index.php/6261/exam-question

About staging area, it's a step before the commit process in git. It's quite similar like clipboard or a box to collect all the changes to be added to the repository before making actual commit. For better visualization, this workflow image below might help ;)

Also, just a shortcut I found helpful:
- If you want to skip the staging area, there's a shortcut in git like git commit -a -m 'good message'
- Adding the -a option means to automatically git add or stage any files that are already tracked by git before doing the commit