How to tell which commit a tag points to in Git?

One way to do this would be with git rev-list. The following will output the commit to which a tag points:

$ git rev-list -n 1 $TAG

NOTE This works for both Annotated and Unannotated tags

You could add it as an alias in ~/.gitconfig if you use it a lot:

[alias]
  tagcommit = rev-list -n 1

And then call it with:

$ git tagcommit $TAG

Possible pitfall: if you have a local checkout or a branch of the same tag name, this solution might get you “warning: refname ‘myTag’ is ambiguous“. In that case, try increasing specificity, e.g.:

$ git rev-list -n 1 tags/$TAG

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