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In this article, we will discuss git prunethe command and its uses. We know that Git is very careful with our data.

When we delete data like commits, Git doesn't easily lose them. This can lead to stale data piling up in our machines.

This is git prunewhere the command comes into play.

We can git prunecall the command a housekeeping utility in Git that is used to clean up orphaned or unreachable Git objects. When we talk about unreachable objects, they are objects that are not reachable from the current refs in our repository.

A good example is when we git reset <Commit ID>roll back to a previous commit using the command. Git stores the deleted commit as a dangling object.

We use git prunethe command to eliminate such data.

Use git prunethe command

git pruneThe command has several useful options, which are listed below.

$ git prune --dry-run

We run the above command to get the output of the command. It does not execute prune.

$ git prune --verbose

The above command will show us all actions and related objects.

$ git prune --progress

We use the command above to check git prunethe progress of .

$ git prune --expire <time>

We use the above command to delete <time>objects older than a specified time ( ).

To better understand this concept, let's look at a practical example. Let's run git logthe command to check the commit history in our local repository.

$ git log --oneline

Let's git resetroll back a commit using the command so that our HEADis at 第六次更新.

$ git reset --hard 27bd68b
HEAD is now at 27bd68b Sixth Update

Let's try to find the deleted commit.

$ git fsck --lost-found

The deleted commit is first; we can confirm this with the first seven characters.

Before running git prunethe command, we must run a reflogwhich will nowexpire entries older than .

$ git reflog expire --expire=now --expire-unreachable=now --all

It would be best to dry runrun this command and see what changes occur.

$ git prune --dry-run

We can now run prunethe command.

$ git prune --verbose --progress --expire=now

Let's check if the dangling commit still exists in our repository.

$ git fsck --lost-found

git pruneThe difference between , git fetch --pruneandgit remote prune

git fetch --pruneThe and git remote prunecommands have similar functionality. We use them to delete references to deleted branches in the remote repository.

It comes in handy when working as a team and you want to get rid of remote branches that were deleted after being merged into the master branch.

git fetch --pruneA command is a combination of:

$ git fetch --all && git remote prune

It will prunefetch from our remote repository before starting As mentioned before, the basic git prunecommand will delete the local objects.