Find/prune local branches after upstream branch is deleted?

Consider this workflow:

$ git checkout -b my/branch hack, commit, ... $ git push -u origin my/branch

The branch gets reviewed, merged, and eventually deleted upstream. The remote tracking branch gets pruned via 'git fetch --prune' or 'git remote prune', but that leaves my local branch with an upstream that has been deleted. Is there a good way to discover this so I can prune my local branches?

$ git branch -vv
  my/branch        6d32ec0 [origin/my/branch] The commit message

I can script it, but this seems like a pretty common thing.

On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 12:11:38PM -0500, Jed Brown wrote:

Try "git branch --merged master" to get a list of branches that have already been merged.

-Peff

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

That's what I use, but I was hoping for something more precise. For example, a branch that started at 'maint' would show up there, but its integration hasn't completed until it makes it back to 'maint'.

On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 12:50:48PM -0500, Jed Brown wrote:

Yeah, git has no way of knowing that. You can tell it by asking "git branch --merged maint" and looking for such topics, of course, but I think you are trying to remove as much thinking as possible from the process.

So what is the clue that you would like to use to know that the branch is stale. Deletion of the branch on the remote?

For that, I don't think there is a single command. You can do "git push --dry-run --all" and look for new branches that would be pushed, but that is kind of hacky. The answer you want is:

  comm -23 \
    <(git for-each-ref --format='%(refname:short)' refs/heads) \
    <(git for-each-ref --format='%(refname:short)' refs/remotes/origin |
      sed s,origin/,,)

You said you didn't want to script, but I think that is the only option to answer that question cleanly.

Note that if you wrap that in an alias, you would want to use "bash -c", as the <() syntax is not understood by many /bin/sh implementations.

-Peff

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

I was hoping for ("has an upstream set" AND "upstream branch deleted").

This also finds my private branches that I just haven't pushed yet. The following has what I think are good semantics.

  git for-each-ref --format='%(refname:short) %(upstream)' refs/heads |
    while read ref upstream; do
      test -n "$upstream" && (git show-ref -q --verify "$upstream" || echo $ref)
    done

FWIW, Git sorts non-alpha characters differently from 'sort'. This means that Git output can't be sent to comm without first '| sort'.

$ git branch xy
$ git branch x-y
$ git branch
* master
  x-y
  xy
$ git branch | sort
* master
  xy
  x-y