Bulk delete git branches

As a software engineer using git, and especially those adopting the gitflow workflow, you will often get to a point where the number of feature/* and bugfix/* branches grows unwieldly. To keep your repository clean and free of cruft it's a good idea to delete these branches.

Begin by listing all local branches by running the following command from the root of your repositiory:

If you look closely you'll notice develop and master branches included in the output. You almost certainly won't want to delete those branches so we need a way to filter the output before deleting.

Filter branch list

Luckily git has a simple way to filter the output.

This filters the output to only include branches begining with 'bugfix'.

Bulk delete using xargs

Finally, we pipe the output into xargs which executes the delete branch command git branch -d.

You may be wondering what the -I % is. This tells xargs to execute our command once for each line of input assigning each line to placeholder %. It's worth noting % is arbitrary and could be another character, _ for example.