git: Delete All Branches but Master

By  on  

Maintenance is incredibly important in any project, but if you want to take your professionalism to the next level, you should keep your git environment in shape.  Unfortunately I'm not that guy -- I leave git branches laying around, even after they've been merged into master.  GitHub even provides a button to do the cleanup but I can't be bothered.  Not good.

When you're ready to do some real cleanup on a repository, throw this at it:

git branch | grep -v "master" | sed 's/^[ *]*//' | sed 's/^/git branch -d /' | bash

The shell command above deletes every branch in your local checkout except for master branch.  This is a dangerous script but you could always check out a given branch from a remote like GitHub if you happen to need it!

Recent Features

  • By
    Camera and Video Control with HTML5

    Client-side APIs on mobile and desktop devices are quickly providing the same APIs.  Of course our mobile devices got access to some of these APIs first, but those APIs are slowly making their way to the desktop.  One of those APIs is the getUserMedia API...

  • By
    5 Awesome New Mozilla Technologies You’ve Never Heard Of

    My trip to Mozilla Summit 2013 was incredible.  I've spent so much time focusing on my project that I had lost sight of all of the great work Mozillians were putting out.  MozSummit provided the perfect reminder of how brilliant my colleagues are and how much...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    WebKit-Specific Style:  -webkit-appearance

    I was recently scoping out the horrid source code of the Google homepage when I noticed the "Google Search" and "I'm Feeling Lucky" buttons had a style definition I hadn't seen before:  -webkit-appearance.  The value assigned to the style was "push-button."  They are buttons so that...

  • By
    Introducing MooTools ScrollSpy

    I've been excited to release this plugin for a long time. MooTools ScrollSpy is a unique but simple MooTools plugin that listens to page scrolling and fires events based on where the user has scrolled to in the page. Now you can fire specific...

Discussion

  1. The script becomes less dangerous, when it uses the

    git branch -d

    variant instead of the upper case -D. Then branches are only deleted, when they are already merged in any of the remaining branches, and no work is lost. (Also, the error messages show you, which branches have work, that has not yet landed in master.)

  2. git remote prune origin -)

  3. lev
    git branch | grep -v "master" | xargs git branch -d
  4. Allie F

    Thank you, this worked well for me. I first tried it with -d, which deleted some, and then decided to go for -D, which did end up deleting everything but master.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!