Most of the time I habitually delete branches after I am done with them, so I don’t need to wonder if there’s any useful work lurking on them. But occasionally they pile up, and then I delete them one by one, while cursing that yeah there is of course a better way to do this, but not right now… Well, one fine day this summer, I finally invested a handful of minutes to find that yay — let’s use this next time:

# Delete all local branches that are fully merged
git branch | grep --invert-match "main" | xargs git branch -d

Deconstructed this command will:

• git branch to list existing branches
• | is a pipe that takes the result from the command on it’s left and sends that into what ever comes on the right hand side of the pipe
• grep --invert-match "main-" to find branch names not matching ‘main’
• another pipe | so any and all branches not matching ‘main’ are piped into the next command
• xargs to repeat what comes next for each output
• git branch -d to ‘delete fully merged branch’

And if I’m absolutely certain I have no local commits I want to keep, I can replace the -d with -D:

-d, --delete          delete fully merged branch
-D                    delete branch (even if not merged)