How to delete all merged local branches in Git with PowerShell

git branch --merged | Select-String -Pattern '^[^\*].*' | ForEach-Object { git branch -d $_.ToString().Trim() }

Steps:

1. List merged branches: git branch --merged

     feature/branch1
     feature/branch2
   * master
   

2. Filter out those that starts with * (current branch): Select-String -Pattern '^[^\*].*'

     feature/branch1
     feature/branch2
   

3. Delete branches ForEach-Object { git branch -d $_.ToString().Trim() }

Notice than in #3 I have removed some whitespace from the output: $_.ToString().Trim(). Otherwise we would get errors like:

error: branch '  feature/yourbranch' not found.

After some playing about, and further research into Powershell commands, I have found a solution!

While Powershell does not have an xargs command, it does have something similar called ForEach-Object. This command allows us to work on each line of the output from git for-each-ref. For this specific problem, the following line did the trick:

git for-each-ref --format '%(refname:short)' refs/heads | ForEach-Object {git branch $_ -d}

The curly braces after the ForEach-Object command contains the command you wish to run, while the $_ variable stands for each line of output from the piped command.

Hope this helps other newbie Powershell/Git users out there!