Deleting a local branch that is no longer in the remote repository in Git

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Deleting a local branch that is no longer in the remote repository in Git

Author：JIYIK Last Updated：2025/04/01 Views：

Suppose your project has many branches created on your local machine but not present in the remote repository. You can easily delete all local branches that are out of sync with the remote repository, but before that, you may want to check all the branches available in your local machine, you can run git branch.

Now, to list all remote branches, you can use git branch -rthe command. To achieve both results in one command, you can use git branch -athe command. After confirming the branch, you can continue reading the rest of this article.

Deleting (pruning) local branches in Git

You can easily run the following command to prune tracking branches that are not on the remote repository.

git remote prune origin

The command above will prune the tracking branches that are not on the remote repository, but the local branches have not been deleted. To actually delete the local branches, you may need to perform the additional steps explained below.

List all branches with verbose output,
```
git branch -vv
```
Now, you pipe the output to grep to find out origin/.* : gone]because gonethe status is placed on a branch that is not available in the remote repository but is available on your local machine.
```
grep 'origin/.*: gone]'
```
Again piping the output to Format awk(which is a very good formatting tool) looks like this.
```
awk '{print $1}'
```
Finally, you want to pipe the output to xargs, which is used when you need to take the output from one command and use it as an argument to another command. You do not pipe the output of step 2 to git branch -dthe command to delete the local branch, as shown below.
```
xargs git branch -d 
```

So the last two linear commands to prune and remove all local branches that are not available in the remote repository are as follows.

git remote prune origin

After running the above command, you may want to run the following command to delete the local branches that are not available in the remote repository.

git branch -vv | grep 'origin/.*: gone]' | awk '{print $1}' | xargs git branch -d

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