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

Answer 2

To delete a branch which is not needed anymore you can use the following command :

git branch -d -r origin/cloner

Answer 3

You also do

git push origin :cloner 

To remove unwanted remote branches

Answer 4

If you have remote-tracking branches (such as origin/cloner in this case) which are left over after the corresponding branch has been deleted in the remote repository, you can delete all such remote-tracking branches with:

git remote prune origin

The documentation for git remote explains this as:

Deletes all stale remote-tracking branches under <name>. These stale branches have already been removed from the remote repository referenced by <name>, but are still locally available in "remotes/<name>".

With --dry-run option, report what branches will be pruned, but do not actually prune them.