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Remove all your local git branches but keep main

Ben Halpern on April 19, 2022

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 o...

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Pandademic • Apr 19 '22 • Edited

We all know I'll never actually remember the command

maybe an alias?
anyway , thanks for the tip!

Ben Halpern • Apr 19 '22

maybe an alias?

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.

Dan Jones • Apr 20 '22

I second using an alias. If you forget the alias you set, you can do git config -l to 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-name to show what it's an alias of.

Pandademic • Apr 20 '22 • Edited

thanks , I didn't know that... It's useful for more complicated aliases.

Ken Bellows • Apr 20 '22 • Edited

... in case I forget what the underlying execution is.

...because you currently remember it so well that you wrote a post for your own future reference? 😛

Lucas Perez • Apr 19 '22

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... 😅

Amir.H Ebrahimi • Apr 23 '22

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.

alias gitrm='git branch --merged | egrep -v "(^\*|master|main|dev)" | xargs git branch -d'

spO0q 🐒🎃 • Apr 21 '22

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?

Rubin • Apr 26 '22

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 do git_branch_delete flip and deletes all branches starting with flip prefix

Stephen Chiang • Apr 21 '22 • Edited

You can create an alias function like this:

removeLocals = "!f() { git branch | grep -v "main" | xargs git branch -D; }; f"

used: git removeLocals

or if you want to account for master vs main

removeLocals = "!f() { git branch | grep -v /"$1/" | xargs git branch -D; }; f"

used: git removeLocals main

I 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

Ben Lovy • Apr 20 '22

Every time I successfully use xargs I spend the next several hours thinking "whoa, I did an xargs". It somehow never gets old.

Solid xargs, good stuff.

Phil Ashby • Apr 20 '22

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.