How do I list all remote branches in Git 1.7+?

Question

I\'ve tried git branch -r, but that only lists remote branches that I\'ve tracked locally. How do I find the list of those that I haven\'t? (It doesn\'t matter

Answer 1

Using git branch -r lists all remote branches and git branch -a lists all branches on local and remote. These lists get outdated though. To keep these lists up-to-date, run

git remote update --prune

which will update your local branch list with all new ones from the remote and remove any that are no longer there. Running this update command without the --prune will retrieve new branches but not delete ones no longer on the remote.

You can speed up this update by specifying a remote, otherwise it will pull updates from all remotes you have added, like so

git remote update --prune origin