How can I delete all Git branches which have been merged?

Question

I have many Git branches. How do I delete branches which have already been merged? Is there an easy way to delete them all instead of deleting them one by one?

Answer 1

The accepted solution is pretty good, but has the one issue that it also deletes local branches that were not yet merged into a remote.

If you look at the output of you will see something like

$ git branch --merged master -v
  api_doc                  3a05427 [gone] Start of describing the Java API
  bla                      52e080a Update wording.
  branch-1.0               32f1a72 [maven-release-plugin] prepare release 1.0.1
  initial_proposal         6e59fb0 [gone] Original proposal, converted to AsciiDoc.
  issue_248                be2ba3c Skip unit-for-type checking. This needs more work. (#254)
  master                   be2ba3c Skip unit-for-type checking. This needs more work. (#254)

Branches bla and issue_248 are local branches that would be deleted silently.

But you can also see the word [gone], which indicate branches that had been pushed to a remote (which is now gone) and thus denote branches can be deleted.

The original answer can thus be changed to (split into multiline for shorter line length)

git branch --merged master -v | \
     grep  "\\[gone\\]" | \
     sed -e 's/^..//' -e 's/\S* .*//' | \
      xargs git branch -d

to protect the not yet merged branches. Also the grepping for master to protect it, is not needed, as this has a remote at origin and does not show up as gone.