How to remove all remote tracking branches that still exist on remote but no longer in my fetch refspec

Question

I recently reorganized my refspec of remote.origin.fetch and now only fetch a small subset of branches from remote. However, git branch -a shows me a lot of remote branches that I fetched previously, although they are no longer fetched now. Using git prune does NOT help because those remote tracking branches do exist in remote.

Answer 1

The answer from robrich has a good hint: You can just remove every remote-tracking branch (or even the remote), and then use git fetch to grab only those you want now from scratch.

If you do try to remove the remote all together, you may want to backup your .git/config file, so that when you add the remote back later, you can pick up the per-remote setting from the backup.

However, removing remote does not remove the remote-tracking branches for me. Maybe my local repo is bad. For any one who has the same problem, what I ended up doing is:

# This deletes all remote tracking branches for all remotes. So be careful if you have multiple remotes.
git branch -r | xargs -L 1 git branch -rD

Also, I have a lot of tags from the remote, which slow things down. I did this too:

# Be careful! This deletes EVERY tag!
git tag | xargs -L 1 git tag -d

You may want to configure git fetch to not fetch all those tags back next time, which is beyond the scope of this question.