Remove all your local git branches but keep main

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!

Comments

[Pandademic]

We all know I'll never actually remember the command

maybe an alias?
anyway , thanks for the tip!

[Ben Halpern]

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]

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]

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

[Ken Bellows]

... 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]

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]

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 🐒🎃]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[spO0q 🐒🎃]

Pretty cool script!

[Layton Whiteley]

If you want to delete only branches that have been deleted remotely then git fetch --prune is an option

[Jaya Krishnan Nair]

i think instead of main $(git_main_branch) should be helpful