Cleaning up old git branches

My local git repository is full of branches which have long-since been merged: code review, one-off features, and quick bug fixes add up really quickly. Deleting these branches is cumbersome.

Complaining on Twitter proved really fruitful:

There’s also git branch --merged, which you could pipe to xargs (assuming you can remember the syntax, which I never can.) – @bjhomer

Of course, he’s right, so finding and deleting them is easy. The end result is this wonderful snippet, which deletes all merged branches:

git branch --merged origin/master | grep -v master | xargs git branch -d

The text spam after it executes can only be described as cathartic.