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
    LightFace:  Facebook Lightbox for MooTools

    One of the web components I've always loved has been Facebook's modal dialog.  This "lightbox" isn't like others:  no dark overlay, no obnoxious animating to size, and it doesn't try to do "too much."  With Facebook's dialog in mind, I've created LightFace:  a Facebook lightbox...

  • By
    Facebook Open Graph META Tags

    It's no secret that Facebook has become a major traffic driver for all types of websites.  Nowadays even large corporations steer consumers toward their Facebook pages instead of the corporate websites directly.  And of course there are Facebook "Like" and "Recommend" widgets on every website.  One...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    WebSocket and Socket.IO

    My favorite web technology is quickly becoming the WebSocket API. WebSocket provides a welcomed alternative to the AJAX technologies we've been making use of over the past few years. This new API provides a method to push messages from client to server efficiently...

  • By
    Create Spinning, Fading Icons with CSS3 and MooTools

    A goal of my latest blog redesign was to practice what I preached a bit more;  add a bit more subtle flair.  One of the ways I accomplished that was by using CSS3 animations to change the display of my profile icons (RSS, GitHub, etc.)  I...

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!