Delete all local git branches

Question

I follow a development process where I create a new local branch for every new feature or story card  When finished I merge the branch into master and then push    What tends to happen over time due to a combination of laziness or forgetfulness  is that I end up with a large list of local branches  some of which  such as spikes  may not have been merged   I know how to list all my local branches and I know how to remove a single branch but I was wondering if there was a git command that allows me to delete all my local branches   Below is the output of the git branch --merged command   user machine   projects application master   git branch --merged   STORY-123-Short-Description   STORY-456-Another-Description   STORY-789-Blah-Blah   master   All attempts to delete branches listed with grep -v     as per the answers below  result in errors   error  branch  STORY-123-Short-Description  not found  error  branch  STORY-456-Another-Description  not found  error  branch  STORY-789-Blah-Blah  not found    I m using  git 1 7 4 1 ubuntu 10 04 GNU bash  version 4 1 5 1 -release GNU grep 2 5 4

User · Answer

Parsing the output of git branch is not recommended  and not a good answer for future readers on Stack Overflow    git branch is what is known as a porcelain command   Porcelain commands are not designed to be machine parsed and the output may change between different versions of Git   There are user configuration options that change the output of git branch in a way that makes it difficult to parse  for instance  colorization    If a user has set color branch then you will get control codes in the output  this will lead to error  branch  foo  not found  if you attempt to pipe it into another command   You can bypass this with the --no-color flag to git branch  but who knows what other user configurations might break things  git branch may do other things that are annoying to parse  like put an asterisk next to the currently checked out branch   The maintainer of git has this to say about scripting around git branch output     To find out what the current branch is  casual careless users may have   scripted around git branch  which is wrong  We actively discourage   against use of any Porcelain command  including git branch  in   scripts  because the output from the command is subject to change to   help human consumption use case    Answers that suggest manually editing files in the  git directory  like  git refs heads  are similarly problematic  refs may be in  git packed-refs instead  or Git may change their internal layout in the future     Git provides the for-each-ref command to retrieve a list of branches    Git 2 7 X will introduce the --merged option to so you could do something like the below to find and delete all branches merged into HEAD   for mergedBranch in   git for-each-ref --format    refname short   --merged HEAD refs heads   do     git branch -d   mergedBranch  done   Git 2 6 X and older  you will need to list all local branches and then test them individually to see if they have been merged  which will be significantly slower and slightly more complicated    for branch in   git for-each-ref --format    refname short   refs heads   do     git merge-base --is-ancestor   branch  HEAD  amp  amp  git branch -d   branch  done

User · Answer

git branch -d  branch name  for local delete git branch -D  branch name  also for local delete but forces it

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I found it easier to just use text editor and shell    Type git checkout  lt TAB gt  in shell  Will show all local branches  Copy them to a text editor  remove those you need to keep  Replace line breaks with spaces   In SublimeText it s super easy   Open shell  type git branch -D  lt PASTE THE BRANCHES NAMES HERE gt     That s it

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Try the following shell command  git branch   grep -v  quot master quot    xargs git branch -D  Explanation    Get all branches  except for the master  via git branch   grep -v  quot master quot  command  Select every branch with xargs command  Delete branch with xargs git branch -D

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Just a note  I would upgrade to git 1 7 10  You may be getting answers here that won t work on your version  My guess is that you would have to prefix the branch name with refs heads    CAUTION  proceed with the following only if you made a copy of your working folder and  git directory   I sometimes just go ahead and delete the branches I don t want straight from  git refs heads  All these branches are text files that contain the 40 character sha-1 of the commit they point to  You will have extraneous information in your  git config if you had specific tracking set up for any of them  You can delete those entries manually as well

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Here s the Powershell solution for anyone running on a Windows machine git checkout master   by being on the master branch  you won t be able to delete it foreach  branch in  git branch         git branch -D  branch Trim

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To delete every branch except the one that you currently have checked out   for b in  git branch --merged   grep -v      do git branch -D  b  done   I would recommend changing git branch -D  b to an echo  b the first few times to make sure that it deletes the branches that you intend

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The below command will delete all the local branches except master branch   git branch   grep -v  master    xargs git branch -D   The above command   list all the branches From the list ignore the master branch and take the rest of the branches delete the branch

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The following script deletes branches  Use it and modify it at your own risk  etc  etc   Based on the other answers in this question  I ended up writing a quick bash script for myself  I called it  gitbd   git branch -D  but if you use it  you can rename it to whatever you want   gitbd     if      -le 1     then     local branches to delete  git for-each-ref --format    refname short   refs heads    grep   1       printf  Matching branches  n n branches to delete n nDelete   Y n        read -n 1 -r   Immediately continue after getting 1 keypress     echo   Move to a new line     if       REPLY     N   amp  amp     REPLY     n           then         echo  branches to delete   xargs git branch -D     fi else   echo  This command takes one arg  match pattern  or no args  match all   fi     It will offer to delete any branches which match a pattern argument  if passed in  or all local branches when called with with no arguments  It will also give you a confirmation step  since  you know  we re deleting things  so that s nice   It s kind of dumb - if there are no branches that match the pattern  it doesn t realize it   An example output run     gitbd test Matching branches   dummy test1 dummy test2 dummy test3  Delete   Y n

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If you don t need to go through Git itself  you can also delete heads under  git refs heads manually or programmatically  The following should work with minimal tweaking under Bash   shopt -s extglob rm -rf  git refs heads   master    This will delete every local branch except your master branch  Since your upstream branches are stored under  git refs remotes  they will remain untouched   If you are not using Bash  or want to recurse a lot of Git repositories at once  you can do something similar with GNU find   find         -path remotes -path logs -prune -o       -wholename    git refs heads       -name master -print0   xargs -0 rm -rf   The find solution is probably more portable  but pruning paths and filenames is tricky and potentially more error-prone

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I recommend a more moderate answer   Many of the answers here use -D which is forced delete regardless of whether changes have been merged or not   Here is a one liner which leaves untouched the branches which have un-merged changes  git branch --merged   egrep -v  quot      master dev  quot    xargs git branch -d  Or you can try other examples listed but just change the -D to -d   I know the OP asked how to delete  but in most use cases  its safer to use -d

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To delete all local branches in linux except the one you are on     hard delete  git branch -D   git branch

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The  git branch -d  subcommand can delete more than one branch   So  simplifying  sblom s answer but adding a critical xargs   git branch -D  git branch --merged   grep -v      xargs    or  further simplified to   git branch --merged   grep -v      xargs git branch -D    Importantly  as noted by  AndrewC  using git branch for scripting is discouraged   To avoid it use something like   git for-each-ref --format    refname short   refs heads   grep -v master   xargs git branch -D   Caution warranted on deletes     mkdir br   cd br  git init Initialized empty Git repository in  Users ebg test br  git    touch README  git add README  git commit -m  First commit   master  root-commit  1d738b5  First commit  0 files changed  0 insertions     0 deletions -   create mode 100644 README   git branch Story-123-a   git branch Story-123-b   git branch Story-123-c   git branch --merged   Story-123-a   Story-123-b   Story-123-c   master   git branch --merged   grep -v      xargs Story-123-a Story-123-b Story-123-c   git branch --merged   grep -v      xargs git branch -D Deleted branch Story-123-a  was 1d738b5   Deleted branch Story-123-b  was 1d738b5   Deleted branch Story-123-c  was 1d738b5

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Make sure you do this first  git fetch   Once you have all remote branches information  use the following command to remove every single branch except master   git branch -a   grep -v  master    grep remotes   sed  s remotes  origin    g    xargs git push origin --delete

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If you work with NodeJS  I wrote this command  npx git-clear-branch  The command clears all of your local branch except master and current branch

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Above answers works fine  Here is another approach when we have lot of branches in local repo and we have to delete many branches except few which are lying in local machine    First git branch will list all the local branches   To transpose the column of branch names into single row in file by running a unix command   git branch  gt  sample txt  This will save it in sample txt file  And run  awk  BEGIN   ORS           print    sample txt  command in shell  This will transform the column to row and copy the list of branch names in single row   And then run git branch -D branch name s   This will delete all listed branches present in local

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From Windows Command Line  delete all except the current checked out branch using   for  f  tokens     f in   git branch    find  v       do git branch -D  f

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For powershell  this will work   git branch --format    refname lstrip 2   --merged         Where-Object      -ne  master            ForEach-Object   git branch -d

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For this purpose  you can use git-extras    git delete-merged-branches Deleted feature themes  was c029ab3   Deleted feature live preview  was a81b002   Deleted feature dashboard  was 923befa

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None of the answers satisfied my needs fully  so here we go   git branch --merged   grep -E   feature bugfix hotfix      xargs git branch -D  amp  amp  git remote prune origin   This will delete all local branches which are merged and starting with feature   bugfix  or hotfix   Afterwards the upstream remote origin is pruned  you may have to enter a password    Works on Git 1 9 5

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I don t have grep or other unix on my box but this worked from VSCode s terminal    git branch -d   git branch  trim    I use the lowercase d so it won t delete unmerged branches   I was also on master when I did it  so   master doesn t exist so it didn t attempt deleting master

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if you want to delete test branch then Step1  go to other branch git branch -d branch name   More Detail in depth

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If you want to delete all your local branches  here is the simple command  git branch -D  git branch   Note  This will delete all the branches except the current checked out branch

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I wrote a shell script in order to remove all local branches except develop  branches   git branch   tr -d       output    for branch in  branches  do   if     branch     develop      then     output   output  branch    fi done git branch -d  output

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Based on a combination of a number of answers here - if you want to keep all branches that exist on remote but delete the rest  the following oneliner will do the trick   git for-each-ref --format    refname short   refs heads   grep -Ev  git ls-remote --quiet --heads origin   awk   print substr  2  12     paste -sd     -    xargs git branch -D

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If you want to keep master  develop and all remote branches  Delete all local branches which are not present on Github anymore    git fetch --prune    git branch   grep -v  quot origin quot    grep -v  quot develop quot    grep -v  quot master quot    xargs git branch -D  1  It will delete remote refs that are no longer in use on the remote repository  2  This will get list of all your branches  Remove branch containing master  develop or origin  remote branches  from the list  Delete all branches in list  Warning - This deletes your own local branches as well  So do this when you have merged your branch and doing a cleanup after merge  delete

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I found a nicer way in a comment on this issue on github   git branch --merged master --no-color   grep -v master   grep -v stable   xargs git branch -d  edit  added no-color option and excluding of stable branch  add other branches as needed in your case

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I had a similar kind of situation and recently found the following command useful   git branch -D  git branch   awk    if   0      lt Branch You Want to Keep gt    printf   s    0       If you want to keep multiple branches  then  git branch -D  git branch   awk    if   0      lt Branch You Want to Keep1 gt   lt Branch You Want to Keep2 gt    printf   s    0       hope this helps someone

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Although this isn t a command line solution  I m surprised the Git GUI hasn t been suggested yet   I use the command line 99  of the time  but in this case its either far to slow  hence the original question   or you don t know what you are about to delete when resorting to some lengthy  but clever shell manipulation   The UI solves this issue since you can quickly check off the branches you want removed  and be reminded of ones you want to keep  without having to type a command for every branch   From the UI go to Branch --  Delete and  Ctrl Click the branches you want to delete so they are highlighted  If you want to be sure they are merged into a branch  such as dev   under Delete Only if Merged Into set Local Branch to dev  Otherwise  set it to Always to ignore this check

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The simpler way to delete all branches but keeping others like  develop  and  master  is the following   git branch   grep -v  develop    grep -v  master    xargs git branch -D   very useful

[git] Delete all local git branches

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