Delete merged branches

Leftovers from merged branches are distracting. Too many of them make commands like git branch -l useless. Here are some commands to clean them up.

Get the list of all branches that have been merged into the current branch.

git branch --merged

Delete all branches that have been merged into the current branch.

• We exclude asterisk because that’s how we identify the current branch.
• git_main_branch is an Oh My Zsh function that returns the name of the main branch.

git branch --merged  "$(git_main_branch)" | grep -v "$(git_main_branch)" | grep -v '*' | xargs -n 1 git branch -d

See if there is anything left among unmerged branches.

git branch --no-merged

Then delete them one by one.

git branch -D <branch_name>

Delete the refs to branches that don’t exist anymore.

git remote prune origin