How to locally delete all remotely merged git branches
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If you are like me and have a bad habit of not deleting your local branches as you merge them and delete them remotely, this one is for you.
A two commands solution
First command to fetch but as well prune any branches that no longer exist on the remote branch.
git fetch -p
-p is short for --prune.
Now that we have a clean slate we can perform an efficient deletion with the second command:
git branch -vv | grep ': gone]'| grep -v "\*" | awk '{ print $1; }' | xargs git branch -D
Here is it decomposed:
git branch -vv
Which lists your local branches and including "gone" if it is not present
anymore remotely. -vv means very verbose.
grep ': gone]'
Which filters all lines including : gone].
grep -v "\*"
Which ignores the currently checked out branch.
awk '{print $1}'
Which grabs the first column in the output, being the branch name.
xargs git branch -D
Which runs git branch -D for the names of the filtered branches.
Et voilà!
If for some reasons you want to exclude some branches that would show up in the
filtered list, amend the grep -v "\*" command to something like egrep -v "(^\*|branch-to-keep1|branch-to-keep2)".