Cleaning Up Old Git Branches

With git commands and bash scripting we can clean up old branches quickly.

The final solution looks like this:

g old | head -n5 | xargs bash -c 'git branch -D $@; git push origin --delete $@;' bash

We can list branches by the date they were committed to, with the oldest at the top. This is added as a git alias.
Branch names output is limited with head and -n, for example for 5 items: head -n5
xargs provides each branch name as $@ substituted in to each of the following git commands.
git commands to delete the branch locally and from a remote named origin are executed for each branch name.

Add the following alias to your ~/.gitconfig.

[alias]
  old = for-each-ref --sort=committerdate --format='%(refname:short)' refs/heads/

When I no longer want a branch locally or on the remote server, I use this function to delete both at once:

function gdel { git branch -D $1; git push origin --delete $1; }

Andrew Atkinson