33.6 Git Branch Cleanup

20240710

Essentially, to remove locally all branches that have been merged into the current branch and so cleanup all the branching information, without losing any work since it’s already included in the current branch, we might do the following:

git branch --merged |
    egrep -v " (dev|main|`git branch --show-current`)$" |
    xargs git branch --delete

In detail, we might first go to the main or dev branch for your project, though this process will work for any branch. Suppose we operate from the dev branch.

git checkout dev
git pull

Then, to list all branches that have been merged into this current branch we run:

git branch --merged

We should see the dev (or current) branch is flagged:

  acb/21_add_permissions
  acb/28_migrate_gui_for_view
  dtc/102_back_to_demo
  dtc/109_redirect_after_init
* dev
  gjw/114_remove_demo_component
  gjw/54_add_about_dialog
  kov/3_login_pod
  kov/61_migrate_parameters
  main
  zay/16_extract_app_version
  zay/212_initialise_pod

We remove dev and main from the list, and in case the current branch is not one of them, we also remove the current branch from the list:

git branch --merged | egrep -v " (dev|main|`git branch --show-current`)$"

For all of the branches now remaining, since they have been merged into the current branch, we delete each of them:

git branch --merged |
    egrep -v " (dev|main|`git branch --show-current`)$" |
    xargs git branch --delete

---

Your donation will support ongoing availability and give you access to the PDF version of this book. Desktop Survival Guides include Data Science, GNU/Linux, and MLHub. Books available on Amazon include Data Mining with Rattle and Essentials of Data Science. Popular open source software includes rattle, wajig, and mlhub. Hosted by Togaware, a pioneer of free and open source software since 1984. Copyright © 1995-2022 Graham.Williams@togaware.com Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0