Multiple remotes setup, how to delete merged branches only from single remote?

Question

I have a repo with many remotes setup because we are using the Forking Workflow

I typically clean all the merged branches from the origin repo every quarter. I'm having difficulty figuring out how to clean the merged branches from the individual remotes.

git branch -r --merged <how can i target a specific remote?> |
  grep -v "develop" |
  grep -v "master" |
  grep -v "pr" |
  sed -r 's/(remote1|remote2|remote3|remote4)\///' |
  xargs git push -d origin

The idea here is to list all the merged branches, filter out develop, master, pr and remove origin/, then git push -d

the problem I'm having is I don't know how to target only a specific remote for deletion. Each time I run this command, it lists all the branches from each remote. Then running the command outputs an error

error: unable to delete '<branch-name>': remote ref does not exist

larsks · Accepted Answer · 2023-03-24 13:38:14Z

2

Since the output of git branch -r --merged includes the remote name, you can use grep (etc) to filter by remote. E.g. to see only those branches in the remote1 remote:

git branch -r --merged | grep remote1/

Putting that together with what you have -- and simplifying things a bit -- we get:

git branch -r --merged |
  grep remote1/ |
  grep -vE 'develop|master|pr' |
  sed 's/[^/]*\///' |
  xargs git push -d remote1

If you're getting errors, replace xargs with echo xargs so you can see the generated command line without running it.

answered Mar 24, 2023 at 13:38

larsks

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jthill · Accepted Answer · 2025-10-22 23:00:21Z

0

The low-level push can take refspecs from stdin and thus batch up the deletes into a single connection.

Assuming the usual remote-tracking map convention, so remote.origin.fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/* and so on, you can

git send-pack $(git config remote.origin.url) --stdin <<EOD
^refs/heads/develop
^refs/heads/master
^refs/heads/pr*
$(git for-each-ref --merged=HEAD \
        --format='+:refs/heads/%(refname:lstrip=3)' \
        refs/remotes/origin/* )
EOD

and you can see what it'll do before doing it by adding a --dry-run option on the send-pack.

answered Oct 22 at 23:00

jthill

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3 Comments

Jeremy Fiel Oct 22 at 23:44

thanks but this is not what I want to do. This command deletes develop, master, and pr. Those are the branches I want to avoid. Nice, concise attempt though. I ended up writing a node script and used the Bitbucket rest api

jthill Oct 23 at 15:30

@JeremyFiel It does not delete those refs. Those are exclusion markers on the front.

Jeremy Fiel Oct 23 at 15:43

ah ok.. i misunderstood it. thanks for your attempt

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