This is just a quick post about git fetch -p. If you work with git a lot (in particular using the terminal, like a proper user should),
then you may notice that for projects where you create a lot of branches to divide work in your team, your git branch output looks sort of
like this:
caleb@work MINGW64 /c/git/Some_Project (develop)
$ git branch -r
remotes/origin/develop
remotes/origin/effort/BRANCH_A
remotes/origin/effort/BRANCH_B
remotes/origin/effort/BRANCH_C
remotes/origin/effort/BRANCH_D
remotes/origin/effort/BRANCH_E
remotes/origin/effort/BRANCH_F
remotes/origin/effort/BRANCH_G
remotes/origin/feature/BRANCH_H
remotes/origin/master
remotes/origin/story/BRANCH_I
remotes/origin/story/BRANCH_J
remotes/origin/story/BRANCH_K
remotes/origin/story/BRANCH_L
remotes/origin/story/BRANCH_M
remotes/origin/story/BRANCH_N
remotes/origin/story/BRANCH_O
remotes/origin/story/BRANCH_P
remotes/origin/story/BRANCH_Q
remotes/origin/story/BRANCH_R
remotes/origin/story/BRANCH_S
remotes/origin/story/BRANCH_T
remotes/origin/story/BRANCH_U
remotes/origin/story/BRANCH_V
remotes/origin/story/BRANCH_W
remotes/origin/story/BRANCH_X
remotes/origin/story/BRANCH_Y
remotes/origin/story/BRANCH_Z
remotes/origin/story/BRANCH_AA
remotes/origin/story/BRANCH_AB
remotes/origin/story/BRANCH_AC
remotes/origin/story/BRANCH_AD
remotes/origin/story/BRANCH_AE
remotes/origin/story/BRANCH_AF
remotes/origin/story/BRANCH_AG
That's a lot of remote branches! And most of these don't exist on remote! What's up? Git is internally tracking these branches with remote branches,
even though those branches don't exist remotely anymore. Simple enough to clean this up, we run git fetch -p, which
Before fetching, remove any remote-tracking references that no longer exist on the remote. Tags are not subject to pruning if they are fetched only because of the default tag auto-following or due to a --tags option. However, if tags are fetched due to an explicit refspec (either on the command line or in the remote configuration, for example if the remote was cloned with the --mirror option), then they are also subject to pruning. Supplying --prune-tags is a shorthand for providing the tag refspec.
So now we run git fetch -p,
caleb@work MINGW64 /c/git/Some_Project (develop)
$ git fetch -p
From https://tfs.unos.corp/Default/Project/_git/Some_Project
- [deleted] (none) -> origin/effort/BRANCH_E
- [deleted] (none) -> origin/effort/BRANCH_F
- [deleted] (none) -> origin/effort/BRANCH_G
- [deleted] (none) -> origin/effort/BRANCH_H
- [deleted] (none) -> origin/effort/BRANCH_I
- [deleted] (none) -> origin/effort/BRANCH_J
- [deleted] (none) -> origin/feature/BRANCH_K
- [deleted] (none) -> origin/story/BRANCH_L
- [deleted] (none) -> origin/story/BRANCH_M
- [deleted] (none) -> origin/story/BRANCH_N
- [deleted] (none) -> origin/story/BRANCH_O
- [deleted] (none) -> origin/story/BRANCH_P
- [deleted] (none) -> origin/story/BRANCH_Q
- [deleted] (none) -> origin/story/BRANCH_R
- [deleted] (none) -> origin/story/BRANCH_S
- [deleted] (none) -> origin/story/BRANCH_T
- [deleted] (none) -> origin/story/BRANCH_U
- [deleted] (none) -> origin/story/BRANCH_V
- [deleted] (none) -> origin/story/BRANCH_W
- [deleted] (none) -> origin/story/BRANCH_X
- [deleted] (none) -> origin/story/BRANCH_Y
- [deleted] (none) -> origin/story/BRANCH_Z
- [deleted] (none) -> origin/story/BRANCH_AA
- [deleted] (none) -> origin/story/BRANCH_AB
- [deleted] (none) -> origin/story/BRANCH_AC
- [deleted] (none) -> origin/story/BRANCH_AD
- [deleted] (none) -> origin/story/BRANCH_AE
- [deleted] (none) -> origin/story/BRANCH_AF
- [deleted] (none) -> origin/story/BRANCH_AG
Great, it looks like we deleted a ton of branches! Let's check:
caleb@work MINGW64 /c/git/Some_Project (develop)
$ git branch -r
remotes/origin/effort/BRANCH_A
remotes/origin/effort/BRANCH_B
remotes/origin/effort/BRANCH_C
remotes/origin/effort/BRANCH_D
Ahh, much better.