Git alias to clean up local branches

I really enjoy crafting my own git aliases! They save so much time!

Today I created the alias git cleanbr. Can you guess what it does? XD

Yes, it cleans local branches that have already been merged into the current branch (exluding some that should not be deleted). It looks like this:

cleanbr = ! git branch -d `git branch --merged | grep -v '^*\\|main\\|master\\|staging\\|devel'`

So what’s going on here? Let’s break it down:

git branch --merged will show all branches that have been merged to the current branch. For example:

$ git branch --merged
  fix-typo
  devel
* master
  update-readme

We need to clean this list up and give it as an input to the git branch -d which deletes the specified local branches. By cleaning up I mean to exclude the branches that we don’t want to delete. In my case, I want to avoid deleting the main¹, master, staging and devel even if they are already merged to my current branch (master in the example). To do that, we’ll use the grep -v (-v for exclusion) and provide the regular expression to match any of the aforementioned branches.

The ! in the beginning of the alias is to treat the command as a new shell command², otherwise you’ll get this error:

fatal: malformed object name |

Another way to solve this is to create a function:

cleanbr = "!f() { git branch -d `git branch --merged | grep -v '^*\\|main\\|master\\|staging\\|devel'`; }; f"

If there is nothing to clean you’ll see this message:

fatal: branch name required

Tricky part

Something that took me a bit of time to figure out was the fact that piping the result of git branch --merged to git branch -d was giving me this error:

error: branch 'fix-typo?[m' not found.
error: branch 'update-readme?[m' not found.

WTF is this strange ?[m characters…? I cannot see them in the terminal, but when I write the output of git branch --merged in a file and open it with vim, I can.

After trying a few things out, I reached out to StackOverflow with a question and very quickly a good soul gave me the answer. The problem was that in my .gitconfig file, I had enabled the color.ui setting to always. This way, git was not skipping to color the output when redirected, ending up in using the ASCII character codes to color the output. Changing the setting to auto fixed my issue. Another solution (if for some reason you want to keep this setting to always) is to use the --no-color flag.

Conclusion

So go ahead, change it to fit your preferences, edit your ~/.gitconfig file and add the following in your aliases. And don’t forget your coloring settings!

[alias]
    cleanbr = ! git branch -d `git branch --merged | grep -v '^*\\|main\\|master\\|staging\\|devel'`
[color]
    ui = auto