When working on bigger teams with multiple branches is very common that old branches stay created. To detect those branches easily git comes with the command:

git fetch -p
git branch --merged

* master
the-everlasting-story
that-guy-that-never-deletes-the-branch

Be sure to update your local branches! That’s why we are running git fetch -p first.

You can also run the same command for branches on the git server

git branch -r --merged

origin/HEAD --> master
origin/the-everlasting-story
origin/that-guy-that-never-deletes-the-branch

Since we know which branches are already merged, we can prune them up easily. For this I created two script to automatically do this:

git branch --merged | grep -v "master" | parallel -I{} git branch -d {}
git branch -r --merged | grep -v "master" | sed -e "s/origin\\///" \
    | parallel -I{} git push origin :{}

Let’s break the second one up:

• git branch -r --merged will list all the merged branches on the git server
• grep -v "master" will remove the master branch from the list, pretty sure we don’t want to delete that one.
• sed -e "s/origin\///" will remove the origin/ string from the branches so we can delete them.
• xargs -I{} git push origin:{} will delete them on Github, if you need to use any other command for your git server, change it here.