 <h3>TL;DR</h3> <p>No branch heads exist yet.</p> <h3>Detailed Explanation</h3> <p>A Git repository has no branches until you make your first commit. A newly-initialized repository sets HEAD to refs/heads/master, but refs/heads/master won't exist or contain a commit pointer until after the first commit is made.</p> <p>During a commit, Git dereferences the symbolic-ref HEAD to find the head of the current branch, and then updates that head with the commit hash supplied by git-commit-tree.</p> <p>The end result is that <code>git branch</code> has nothing to report in a new repository. With no branch heads present, it simply terminates silently with an exit status of zero.</p> <h3>See Also</h3> <ul> <li>git-branch(1)</li> <li>git-commit-tree(1)</li> <li>git-symbolic-ref(1).</li> <li>git-update-ref(1)</li> <li>gitcore-tutorial(7)</li> </ul>