Delete multiple remote branches in git

Question

I have a team member who inadvertently pushed over 150 of his local branches to our central repo. Thankfully, they all have the same prefix. Using that prefix, is there a git command or cool little shell script I can use that will delete all of those at once?

Answer 1

Use the following command to remove all branches with PREFIX prefix on remote server.

git branch -r | awk -F/ '/\/PREFIX/{print $2}' | xargs -I {} git push origin :{}

You may want to do a dry-run first to see if it is the branches that you want to remove:

git branch -r | awk -F/ '/\/PREFIX/{print $2}'

Answer 2

If you like a simpler approach, for instance delete 3 or 4 branches:

git push origin --delete <branch1> <branch2> <branch3>

Important: Only works on Git v1.7.0 and above.