Can you delete multiple branches in one command with Git?

Question

I'd like to clean up my local repository, which has a ton of old branches: for example 3.2, 3.2.1, 3.2.2, etc.

I was hoping for a sneaky way to remove a lot of them at once. Since they mostly follow a dot release convention, I thought maybe there was a shortcut to say:

git branch -D 3.2.* 

and kill all 3.2.x branches.

I tried that command and it, of course, didn't work.

Answer 1

Not with that syntax. But you can do it like this:

git branch -D 3.2 3.2.1 3.2.2 

Basically, git branch will delete multiple branch for you with a single invocation. Unfortunately it doesn't do branch name completion. Although, in bash, you can do:

git branch -D `git branch | grep -E '^3\.2\..*'`