Git list of branch names of specific remote

Question

How can it possible to get all names of some remote origin branches?

I started from --remote --list options, but got redundant origin/HEAD -> origin/master message and branches from the another origin.

$> git branch --remote --list   origin/HEAD -> origin/master   origin1/develop   origin1/feature/1   origin1/feature/2   origin1/feature/3   origin1/master   origin2/develop   origin2/feature/1   origin2/feature/2   origin2/master 

Branches of specific origin could be matched with <pattern> option, but redundant message is still there. Actually that pattern is not really correct, because some origin's name could be a substring of another origin name, or even some branch.

$> git branch --remote --list origin1*   origin1/HEAD -> origin/master   origin1/develop   origin1/feature/1   origin1/feature/2   origin1/feature/3   origin1/master 

What am I looking for is a list of branch names of origin1, any of them I could use for git checkout command. Something like that:

develop feature/1 feature/2 feature/3 master 

It's important that it should be done without grep, sed, tail or even ghc -e wrappers, only with true git power, because of their unsafeness and variation.

Answer 1

It's important that it should be done without grep, sed, tail or even ghc -e wrappers, only with true git power, because of their unsafeness and variation.

That is only true for git porcelain commands (see "What does the term porcelain mean in Git?")

Use the plumbing command ls-remote, and then you will be able to filter its output.

ls-remote without parameter would still list the remote HEAD:

git@vonc-VirtualBox:~/ce/ce6/.git$ git ls-remote origin 8598d26b4a4bbe416f46087815734d49ba428523    HEAD 8598d26b4a4bbe416f46087815734d49ba428523    refs/heads/master 38325f657380ddef07fa32063c44d7d6c601c012    refs/heads/test_trap 

But if you ask only for the heads of said remote:

git@vonc-VirtualBox:~/ce/ce6/.git$ git ls-remote --heads origin 8598d26b4a4bbe416f46087815734d49ba428523    refs/heads/master 38325f657380ddef07fa32063c44d7d6c601c012    refs/heads/test_trap 

Final answer:

git@vonc-VirtualBox:~/ce/ce6/.git$ git ls-remote --heads origin  | sed 's?.*refs/heads/??' master test_trap 

(Yes, it uses sed, but the output of a plumbing command is supposed to be stable enough to be parsed)

---

See also Git 2.23 (Q3 2019) which documents an example:

git branch -r -l '<remote>/<pattern>' git for-each-ref 'refs/remotes/<remote>/<pattern>' 

Answer 2

An alternate method, after some research into the same problem, is:

git for-each-ref --format='%(refname:strip=2)' refs/remotes/<remote_name> 

This will give a sorted list of your local refs for the named remote at the point you last fetched.

You can adjust this for their tags etc.