Getting rid of '… does not point to a valid object' for an old git branch

Question

I have a fork of a Git repo and my clone appears to have an issue with an old, no longer existant, branch. I keep seeing this message:

error: refs/heads/t_1140

Answer 1

Check .git/refs/remotes/origin. They are there and the upstream no longer has them. To clean out the remotes that no longer exist run

git remote prune origin

You could also see what it would to by adding --dry-run before actually doing it.