Tools: I Found A Useful Git One Liner Buried In Leaked Cia Developer Docs

In 2017, WikiLeaks published Vault7 - a large cache of CIA hacking tools and internal documents. Buried among the exploits and surveillance tools was something far more mundane: a page of internal developer documentation with git tips and tricks.

Most of it is fairly standard stuff, amending commits, stashing changes, using bisect. But one tip has lived in my ~/.zshrc ever since.

Over time, a local git repo accumulates stale branches. Every feature branch, hotfix, and experiment you’ve ever merged sits there doing nothing. git branch starts to look like a graveyard.

But deleting them one by one is tedious. The CIA’s dev team has a cleaner solution:

Since most projects now use main instead of master, you can update the command and exclude any other branches you frequently use:

Run this from main after a deployment and your branch list goes from 40 entries back down to a handful.

I keep this as a git alias so I don’t have to remember the syntax:

Small thing, but one of those commands that quietly saves a few minutes every week and keeps me organised.

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Source: HackerNews