Can “git pull --all” update all my local branches?

Question

I often have at least 3 remote branches: master, staging and production. I have 3 local branches that track those remote branches.

Updating all my local branches is

Answer 1

This issue is not solved (yet), at least not easily / without scripting: see this post on git mailing list by Junio C Hamano explaining situation and providing call for a simple solution.

The major reasoning is that you shouldn't need this:

With git that is not ancient (i.e. v1.5.0 or newer), there is no reason to have local "dev" that purely track the remote anymore. If you only want to go-look-and-see, you can check out the remote tracking branch directly on a detached HEAD with "git checkout origin/dev".

Which means that the only cases we need to make it convenient for users are to handle these local branches that "track" remote ones when you do have local changes, or when you plan to have some.

If you do have local changes on "dev" that is marked to track the remove "dev", and if you are on a branch different from "dev", then we should not do anything after "git fetch" updates the remote tracking "dev". It won't fast forward anyway

The call for a solution was for an option or external script to prune local branches that follow now remote-tracking branches, rather than to keep them up-to-date by fast-forwarding, like original poster requested.

So how about "git branch --prune --remote=" that iterates over local branches, and if

(1) it is not the current branch; and
(2) it is marked to track some branch taken from the ; and
(3) it does not have any commits on its own;

then remove that branch? "git remote --prune-local-forks " is also fine; I do not care about which command implements the feature that much.

Note: as of git 2.10 no such solution exists. Note that the git remote prune subcommand, and git fetch --prune are about removing remote-tracking branch for branch that no longer exists on remote, not about removing local branch that tracks remote-tracking branch (for which remote-tracking branch is upstream branch).