Can I delete all the local branches except the current one?

Question

I want to delete all branches that get listed in the output of ...

$ git branch

... but keeping current branch, in one step. Is th

Answer 1

git branch -d (or -D) allows multiple branch names, but it's a bit tricky to automatically supply "all local branches excluding the one I'm on now" without writing at least a little bit of code.

The "best" (formally correct) method is to use git for-each-ref to get the branch names:

git for-each-ref --format '%(refname:short)' refs/heads

but then it's even harder to figure out which branch you're on (git symbolic-ref HEAD is the "formally correct" method for this, if you want to write a fancy script).

More conveniently, you can use git branch, which prints your local branch names preceded by two spaces or (for the current branch) by an asterisk *. So, run this through something to remove the * version and you're left with space-separated branch names, which you can then pass to git branch -d:

git branch -d $(git branch | grep -v '^*')

or:

git branch | grep -v '^*' | xargs git branch -d

Note that lowercase -d won't delete a "non fully merged" branch (see the documentation). Using -D will delete such branches, even if this causes commits to become "lost"; use this with great care, as this deletes the branch reflogs as well, so that the usual "recover from accidental deletion" stuff does not work either.