List git branches that can safely be deleted

Question

If you do git branch -d branchname, it will delete branch name if it references an earlier commit in your history, or tell you that you need to use -D otherwise. I often create branches that are later pushed to master, and can thus be deleted by this criterion. Is there an easy way to list all the branches that point to earlier commits of master, that is, branches that git will not mind deleting with just the -d option? Bonus points if it works for all branches at once, not just master.

I've got 82 local branches and I know that quite a few if not most of them can safely be deleted by now, but I don't want to take the time to go through each one to try to do it.

Answer 1

Try:

$ git checkout master # or whatever branch you might compare against ... $ git branch --no-merged $ git branch --merged 

From git branch documentation:

With --merged, only branches merged into the named commit (i.e. the branches whose tip commits are reachable from the named commit) will be listed. With --no-merged only branches not merged into the named commit will be listed. If the argument is missing it defaults to HEAD (i.e. the tip of the current branch).

EDIT:

to show this for every branch, you could do something like this:

example repo:

o <--- experimental | o | o <--- next | o | o <--- master | o----o <--- broken | o |   $ for branch in `git branch --no-color --verbose | \ sed -e 's/*//' | awk '{print $1}'`; \ do echo "[$branch]"; git checkout -q $branch; git branch --merged; done  [broken] * broken [master] * master [next] master * next [experimental] master next * experimental 

Answer 2

git show-branch is a little known but pretty useful tool that visually shows the commits that are unique to each branch. It can be hard to decipher at first but once you understand the output it's pretty usable. There's a brief but good introduction available.

DESCRIPTION

   Shows the commit ancestry graph starting from the commits named    with <rev>s or <globs>s (or all refs under refs/heads and/or    refs/tags) semi-visually.     It cannot show more than 29 branches and commits at a time.