How to reference the initial commit?

I've got a script that needs to reference the initial commit in a repository. git has the special reference HEAD, but doesn't have the corresponding TAIL. I cannot find anything in git help rev-parse that would seem to help me. Here's what I'd like to do: git show TAIL Here's one option I have: git show `git log --reverse | if read a commit ; then echo $commit ; fi` That's pretty hacky and depends

[tanjoin]

“git rev-list --max-parents=0 HEAD”