The only case in which this wouldn't work is when you have a ton of necessary local branches you can't even push to remote, which is a risk and anti-pattern per se.

Beyond that, this is just OP learning how `xargs` works.

git branch | xargs git branch -d

Don't quote me, that's off the top of my head.

It won't delete unmerged branches by default. The line with the marker for the current branch throws an error but it does no harm. And I just run it with `develop` checked out. If I delete develop by accident I can recreate it from origin/develop.

Sometimes I intentionally delete develop if my develop branch is far behind the feature branch I'm on. If I don't and I have to switch to a really old develop and pull before merging in my feature branch, it creates unnecessary churn on my files and makes my IDE waste time trying to build the obsolete stuff. And depending how obsolete it is and what files have changed, it can be disruptive to the IDE.

I also set mine up to run on `git checkout master` so that I don't really have to think about it too hard -- it just runs automagically. `gcm` has now become muscle memory for me.

  alias gcm=$'git checkout master || git checkout main && git pull && git remote prune origin && git branch -vv | grep \': gone]\'|  grep -v "\*" | awk \'{ print $1; }\' | xargs -r git branch -D'

All those "merged" workflows only work, if you actually merge the branches. It doesn't work with a squash merge workflow.

edit: I delegate this task to a coding agent. I'm really bad at bash commands. yolo!

Unfortunately its name makes it hard to search for and find.

    DEFAULT_BRANCH=$(git remote show origin | sed -n '/HEAD branch/s/.*: //p')

    git branch --merged "origin/$DEFAULT_BRANCH" \
      | grep -vE "^\s*(\*|$DEFAULT_BRANCH)" \
      | xargs -r -n 1 git branch -d

https://replicated.wiki/blog/partII.html#navigating-the-hist...