I have a repo with many remotes setup because we are using the Forking Workflow

I typically clean all the merged branches from the origin repo every quarter. I’m having difficulty figuring out how to clean the merged branches from the individual remotes.

git branch -r --merged <how can i target a specific remote?> |
  grep -v "develop" |
  grep -v "master" |
  grep -v "pr" |
  sed -r 's/(remote1|remote2|remote3|remote4)\///' |
  xargs git push -d origin

The idea here is to list all the merged branches, filter out develop, master, pr and remove origin/, then git push -d

the problem I’m having is I don’t know how to target only a specific remote for deletion. Each time I run this command, it lists all the branches from each remote. Then running the command outputs an error

error: unable to delete '<branch-name>': remote ref does not exist

>Solution :

Since the output of git branch -r --merged includes the remote name, you can use grep (etc) to filter by remote. E.g. to see only those branches in the remote1 remote:

git branch -r --merged | grep remote1/

Putting that together with what you have — and simplifying things a bit — we get:

git branch -r --merged |
  grep remote1/ |
  grep -vE 'develop|master|pr' |
  sed 's/[^/]*\///' |
  xargs git push -d remote1

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If you’re getting errors, replace xargs with echo xargs so you can see the generated command line without running it.