Can you delete multiple branches in one command with Git

Question

I d like to clean up my local repository  which has a ton of old branches  for example 3 2  3 2 1  3 2 2  etc   I was hoping for a sneaky way to remove a lot of them at once  Since they mostly follow a dot release convention  I thought maybe there was a shortcut to say   git branch -D 3 2     and kill all 3 2 x branches   I tried that command and it  of course  didn t work

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Use  git for-each-ref --format    refname short    refs heads 3 2         xargs git branch -D

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Powershell Solution   If you re running windows  you can use PowerShell to remove multiple branches at once     git branch -D   git branch   Select-String -Pattern    s 3  2         foreach    ToString   Trim       this will remove all branches starting with 3 2   git branch -D   git branch   Select-String -Pattern  feature-      foreach    ToString   Trim        this will delete all branches that contains the word  feature-  as a substring    You can also fine tune how the pattern matching should work using Powershell s Select-String command  Take a look at powershell docs

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I made a small function that might be useful based off of the answer provided by  gawi  above      removeBranchesWithPrefix       git for-each-ref --format    refname short   refs heads  1     xargs git branch -d     Add that to your  bash profile and restart your terminal  Then you can call from command-line like this   removeBranchesWithPrefix somePrefix   Note  I have it currently setup for a soft delete  which means it won t delete the branches unless they ve already been merged   If you like to live on the edge  change -d to -D and it will delete everything with the prefix regardless

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To delete multiple branches based on a specified pattern do the following  Open the terminal  or equivalent and type in following commands  git branch   grep  quot  lt pattern gt  quot   preview of the branches based on pattern   git branch   grep  quot  lt pattern gt  quot    xargs git branch -D  replace the  lt pattern gt  with a regular expression to match your branch names   Remove all 3 2 x branches  you need to type git branch   grep  quot 3 2 quot    xargs git branch -D  That s all  You are good to go

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git branch -D  lt branchName gt

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You can use this command  git branch -D   printf   s n    git branch    grep  3 2

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If you want to delete multiple branches for cleanup this will work  git branch -d branch1 branch2 branch3  also if you want to reflect the deletion action to remote you can use this to push them  git push origin --delete branch1 branch2 branch3

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deleting branch names  started with 202008    Tested on centos7  git branch   grep  202008   xargs git branch -D you can try git branch   grep  3 2    xargs git branch -D

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If you have installed Git GUI  which is a default add-on for Windows  then it s the simplest  You can use ctrl to choose multiple branches and delete them with one click

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If you had all the branches to delete in a text file  branches-to-del txt   one branch per line   then you could do this to delete all such branches from the remote  origin     xargs -a branches-to-del txt git push --delete origin

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I you re on windows  you can use powershell to do this    git branch   grep  feature         git branch -D    trim       replace feature   with any pattern you like

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I just cleaned up a large set of obsolete local remote branches today   Below is how I did it   1  list all branch names to a text file   git branch -a    BranchNames txt  2  append the branches I want to delete to command  git branch -D -r    git branch -D -r origin dirA branch01 origin dirB branch02 origin dirC branch03      append whatever branch names   3  execute the cmd  And this one works so much faster and reliable than  git push origin --delete    This may not be the most smart way as listed in other answers  but this one is pretty straight forward  and easy to use

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I put my initials and a dash  at-  as the first three characters of the branch name for this exact reason   git branch -D  git branch --list  at-

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If you re not limited to using the git command prompt  then you can always run git gui and use the Branch- Delete menu item  Select all the branches you want to delete and let it rip

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Use the following command to remove all branches  checked out branch will not be deleted    git branch   cut -d     -f 1   tr -d    t r    xargs git branch -d   Edit  I am using a Mac Os

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git branch    cut -c3-   egrep   3 2    xargs git branch -D                                                                                                 --- create arguments                                                    from standard input                                                                            ---your regexp                                           --- skip asterisk     --- list all         local        branches   EDIT   A safer version  suggested by Jakub Narebski and Jefromi   as git branch output is not meant to be used in scripting   git for-each-ref --format    refname short   refs heads 3 2     xargs git branch -D       or the xargs-free   git branch -D  git for-each-ref --format    refname short   refs heads 3 2

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As in Git all the branches are nothing by references to the git repo  why don t you just delete the branches going to  git ref and then if anything is left out which is not interesting in the repository will automatically be garbage collected so you don t need to bother

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Keep  develop  and delete all others in local      git branch   grep -v  develop    xargs git branch -D

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it works correctly for me   git branch   xargs git branch -d  git branch   xargs git branch -D   delete all local branches

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If you really need clean all of your branches  try  git branch -d   git branch   It will delete all your local merged branches except the one you re currently checking in   It s a good way to make your local clean

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Maybe You will find this useful   If You want to remove all branches that are not for example  master    foo  and  bar    git branch -D  git branch   grep -vE  master foo bar     grep -v  something  is a matcher with inversion

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You can remove all the branches removing all the unnecessary refs   rm  git refs heads 3 2

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You can use git gui to delete multiple branches at once  From Command Prompt Bash -  git gui -  Remote -  Delete branch     -  select remote branches you want to remove -  Delete

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For pure souls who use PowerShell here the small script  git branch -d   git branch --list  3 2           Trim

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You can use git branch --list to list the eligible branches  and use git branch -D -d to remove the eligible branches    One liner example    git branch -d  git branch --list  3 2

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If you are using Fish shell  you can leverage the string functions   git branch -d  git branch -l   lt your pattern gt     string trim    This is not much different from the Powershell options in some of the other answers

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git branch -d branch1 branch2 branch3 already works  but will be faster with Git 2 31  Q1 2021   Before  when removing many branches and tags  the code used to do so one ref at a time  There is another API it can use to delete multiple refs  and it makes quite a lot of performance difference when the refs are packed  See commit 8198907  20 Jan 2021  by Phil Hord  phord    Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit f6ef8ba  05 Feb 2021   8198907795 use delete refs when deleting tags or branches Acked-by  Elijah Newren Signed-off-by  Phil Hord    git tag -d  man  accepts one or more tag refs to delete  but each deletion is done by calling delete ref on each argv  This is very slow when removing from packed refs  Use delete refs instead so all the removals can be done inside a single transaction with a single update  Do the same for  git branch -d  man   Since delete refs performs all the packed-refs delete operations inside a single transaction  if any of the deletes fail then all them will be skipped  In practice  none of them should fail since we verify the hash of each one before calling delete refs  but some network error or odd permissions problem could have different results after this change  Also  since the file-backed deletions are not performed in the same transaction  those could succeed even when the packed-refs transaction fails  After deleting branches  remove the branch config only if the branch ref was removed and was not subsequently added back in  A manual test deleting 24 000 tags took about 30 minutes using delete ref  It takes about 5 seconds using delete refs

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Recently  I was looking for solution of same problem  finally i found one answer and it is working very well    Open the terminal  or equivalent  Type in git branch   grep   pattern   for a preview of the branches  that will be deleted  Type in git branch   grep   pattern     xargs git branch -D   This solution is awesome and if you want full explanation of each command and how it is working  its given here

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Well  in the worst case  you could use  git branch   grep  3  2    xargs git branch -D

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Not with that syntax  But you can do it like this   git branch -D 3 2 3 2 1 3 2 2   Basically  git branch will delete multiple branch for you with a single invocation  Unfortunately it doesn t do branch name completion  Although  in bash  you can do   git branch -D  git branch   grep -E   3  2

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You might like this little item     It pulls the list and asks for confirmation of each item before finally deleting all selections     git branch -d  git for-each-ref --format    refname short   refs heads      while read -r line  do read -p  remove branch   line  y N    answer  lt  dev tty  case   answer  in y Y  echo   line    esac  done    Use -D to force deletions  like usual    For readability  here is that broken up line by line     git branch -d  git for-each-ref --format    refname short   refs heads          while read -r line  do          read -p  remove branch   line  y N    answer  lt  dev tty          case   answer  in y Y  echo   line             esac       done    here is the xargs approach     git for-each-ref --format    refname short   refs heads      while read -r line  do      read -p  remove branch   line  y N    answer  lt  dev tty      case   answer  in          y Y  echo   line         esac   done   xargs git branch -D   finally  I like to have this in my  bashrc  alias gitselect  git for-each-ref --format    refname short   refs heads      while read -r line  do read -p  select branch   line  y N    answer  lt  dev tty  case   answer  in y Y  echo   line    esac  done    That way I can just say   gitSelect   xargs git branch -D

[git] Can you delete multiple branches in one command with Git?

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