Delete branches listed by git branch -a

Question

The command git branch -a lists a bunch of branches that are NOT on the repository, and NOT local branches. How can these be deleted?

* develop
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Answer 1

It may also happen that the remote repository reference has been deleted from the local clone, but still appears in the output of the 'git branch -a' command. In any case, you can always suppress any reference simply by deleting the corresponding files:

$ rm -f .git/refs/remotes/cloner
$ rm -rf .git/refs/remotes/deprecated_remote