Question

I am about to complete a tedious process of converting “dumb snapshots” to git. This process has been going very well (thanks to this rename process), but now I realized that some of the branches that I created, do not merit a branch but rather a tag.

Since everything is still local (never pushed to a repository), I found this question (and associated answer) somewhat more cumbersome than I prefer, so I was wondering whether I can take a shortcut via some simple “convert-from-branch-to-tag” command?

Is there such a simple command to convert a branch to a tag?

(I know I can just leave it as is, but I really like the way gitk highlights tags, helping me easily identify them).

UPDATE: Thanks to @Andy’s answer below, I managed to come up with a shell script that does it all conveniently and painlessly. I am sharing this script for the benefit of all and as special thanks to this great community who made moving from CVS to git possible for me:

#!/bin/sh

BRANCHNAME=$1
TAGNAME=$2

echo "Request to convert the branch ${BRANCHNAME} to a tag with the same name accepted."
echo "Processing..."
echo " "

git show-ref --verify --quiet refs/heads/${BRANCHNAME}
# $? == 0 means local branch with <branch-name> exists. 

if [ $? == 0 ]; then
   git checkout ${BRANCHNAME}
   git tag ${BRANCHNAME}
   git checkout master
   git branch ${BRANCHNAME} -d
   echo " "
   echo "Updated list branches, sorted chronologically: "
   echo "---------------------------------------------- "
   git log --no-walk --date-order --oneline --decorate $(git rev-list --branches --no-walk) | cut -d "(" -f 2 | cut -d ")" -f 1
else
   echo "Sorry. The branch ${BRANCHNAME} does NOT seem to exist. Exiting."
fi

Answer 1

Was there separate development on these branches? (the post you linked to, doesn’t appear to have development on those branches)
If there was no development, you could:

1. Checkout the branch git checkout branchName.
2. Tag it with git tag tagName.
3. Switch back to master git checkout master.
4. Finally, delete original branch with git branch branchName -d.

This can also be done if there was development on the branch, but you will need to use -D instead of -d. I’m not a git pro though, so not sure if that is an “acceptable” way to leave a branch.