Git list of branch names of specific remote

An alternate method, after some research into the same problem, is:

git for-each-ref --format='%(refname:strip=2)' refs/remotes/<remote_name>

This will give a sorted list of your local refs for the named remote at the point you last fetched.

You can adjust this for their tags etc.

The existing answer both uses something explicitly not wanted in the question (sed) and is a remote command.

I found this that avoids both those issues, uses only local git commands and a pipe:

git rev-parse --remotes=origin | git name-rev --name-only --stdin

Update: Not really optimal either, but keeping it if someone knows how to improve it. It lists the full remote including the /remotes/origin prefix if you have no local branch, but only the local name if you have. In addition it seem to skip some refs if there are several pointing to the same SHA1.

It's important that it should be done without grep, sed, tail or even ghc -e wrappers, only with true git power, because of their unsafeness and variation.

That is only true for git porcelain commands (see "What does the term porcelain mean in Git?")

Use the plumbing command ls-remote, and then you will be able to filter its output.

ls-remote without parameter would still list the remote HEAD:

git@vonc-VirtualBox:~/ce/ce6/.git$ git ls-remote origin
8598d26b4a4bbe416f46087815734d49ba428523    HEAD
8598d26b4a4bbe416f46087815734d49ba428523    refs/heads/master
38325f657380ddef07fa32063c44d7d6c601c012    refs/heads/test_trap

But if you ask only for the heads of said remote:

git@vonc-VirtualBox:~/ce/ce6/.git$ git ls-remote --heads origin
8598d26b4a4bbe416f46087815734d49ba428523    refs/heads/master
38325f657380ddef07fa32063c44d7d6c601c012    refs/heads/test_trap

Final answer:

git@vonc-VirtualBox:~/ce/ce6/.git$ git ls-remote --heads origin  | sed 's?.*refs/heads/??'
master
test_trap

(Yes, it uses sed, but the output of a plumbing command is supposed to be stable enough to be parsed)

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See also Git 2.23 (Q3 2019) which documents an example:

git branch -r -l '<remote>/<pattern>'
git for-each-ref 'refs/remotes/<remote>/<pattern>'