I frequently search for the code to delete all local branches except master so I can copy/paste the result, but I always get the "master" version of this — which doesn't help the copy/paste part of it.
$ git branch | grep -v "main" | xargs git branch -D
Here's hoping this becomes the top result so I can speed up my process by one second. We all know I'll never actually remember the command.
Happy coding!
Top comments (18)
maybe an alias?
anyway , thanks for the tip!
That's reasonable. I have aliases for a lot of my more frequent tasks like this. It's irrational in this case so maybe I should just get over this — but I feel a little nervous about making aliases for anything I use infrequently in case I forget what the underlying execution is.
I second using an alias. If you forget the alias you set, you can do
git config -lto list all config values, including aliases, and just scan through them.Or, if you remember the alias name, you can do
get config --get alias.alias-nameto show what it's an alias of.thanks , I didn't know that... It's useful for more complicated aliases.
...because you currently remember it so well that you wrote a post for your own future reference? 😛
One observation to be made is if you for some reason has another branch that has "main" as part of its name, this command would not delete it. Maybe
grep -v "^\*\? *main$", but then its getting already too complicated... 😅make an alias out of it which also protect master and dev branches,
and also try to delete them in safer way with -d instead of -D.
Nice use of pipes 🦄
The only potential "problem" with the capital D option is that it's a force delete (unlike
-d), regardless of any merged status or other potential state.You might end up desynchronizing remote and local repos and lose any change you made but I guess it's the purpose here. May I ask you the exact context to use it? What do you typically do before/after running thing command?
most of my local branches have a prefix. So when i needed to cleanup all the local branches except the prod ,i have an alias set as
git_branch_delete="git branch | grep $@ | xargs git branch -D". So i just dogit_branch_delete flipand deletes all branches starting withflipprefixYou can create an alias function like this:
used:
git removeLocalsor if you want to account for master vs main
used:
git removeLocals mainI recommend not doing the second one as you may accidentally remove your local version of main/master due to a typo
You could also just make two aliases removeLocalsMain and removeLocalsMaster
Every time I successfully use
xargsI spend the next several hours thinking "whoa, I did anxargs". It somehow never gets old.Solid
xargs, good stuff.Ha, nice :)
For extra coolness, especially when processing files with whitespace, I have trained my muscle memory to use:
find ... -print0 | xargs -0 ...replacing the whitespace separator with ASCII NUL.
Pretty cool script!
If you want to delete only branches that have been deleted remotely then
git fetch --pruneis an optioni think instead of main
$(git_main_branch)should be helpful