What if you first attempted rebases of your branches? Then you would detect empty branches

I recently revised my script to rely on (1) no commits in the last 30 days and (2) branch not found on origin. This is obviously not perfect, but it's good enough for me and just in case, my script prompts to confirm before deleting each branch, although most of the time I just blindly hit yes.

To avoid losing any work, I have a habit of never keeping branches local-only for long. Additionally this relies on https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/configuring-branches...

Not just squash merges, rebase-merges also don't work.

> What tools are the best to do the equivalent but for squash-merged branches detections?

Hooking on remote branch deletion is what most people do, under the assumption that you tend to clean out the branches of your PRs after a while. But of course if you don't do that it doesn't work.

I have the same issue. Changes get pushed to gerrit and rebased on the server. This is what I have, though not perfected yet.

  prunable = "!f() { \
  : git log ; \
  target=\"$1\"; \
  [ -z \"$target\" ] && target=$(git for-each-ref --format=\"%(refname:short)\" --count=1 refs/remotes/m/); \
  if [ -z \"$target\" ]; then echo \"No remote branches found in refs/remotes/m/\"; return 1; fi; \
  echo \"# git branch --merged shows merged if same commit ID only\" ;\
  echo \"# if rebased, git cherry can show branch HEAD is merged\"  ;\
  echo \"# git log grep will check latest commit subject only.  if amended, this status won't be accurate\" ;\
  echo \"# Comparing against $target...\"; \
  echo \"# git branch --merged:\"; \
  git branch --merged $target  ;\
  echo \" ,- git cherry\" ; \
  echo \" |  ,- git log grep latest message\"; \
  for branch in $(git for-each-ref --format='%(refname:short)' refs/heads/); do \
   if git cherry \"$target\" \"$branch\" | tail -n 1 | grep -q \"^-\"; then \
    cr=""; \
   else \
    cr=""; \
   fi ; \
   c=$(git rev-parse --short $branch) ; \
   subject=$(git log -1 --format=%s \"$branch\" | sed 's/[][(){}.^$\*+?|\\/]/\\\\&/g') ; \
   if git log --grep=\"^$subject$\" --oneline \"$target\" | grep -q .; then \
    printf \"$cr  $c %-20s $subject\\n\"  $branch; \
   else \
    printf \"$cr  \\033[0;33m$c \\033[0;32m%-20s\\033[0m $subject\\n\"  $branch; \
   fi; \
  done; \
  }; f"

(some emojis missing in above. see gist) https://gist.github.com/lawm/8087252b4372759b2fe3b4052bf7e45...

It prints the results of 3 methods:

1. git branch --merged

2. git cherry

3. grep upstream git log for a commit with the same commit subject

Has some caveats, like if upstream's commit was amended or the actual code change is different, it can have a false positive, or if there are multiple commits on your local branch, only the top commit is checked

Depends on your workflow, I guess. I don't need to handle that case you noted and we delete the branch on remote after it's merged. So, it's good enough for me to delete my local branch if the upstream branch is gone. This is the alias I use for that, which I picked up from HN.

    # ~/.gitconfig
    [alias]
        gone = ! "git fetch -p && git for-each-ref --format '%(refname:short) %(upstream:track)' | awk '$2 == \"[gone]\" {print $1}' | xargs -r git branch -D"

Then you just `git gone` every once in a while, when you're between features.

This is my PowerShell variant for squash merge repos:

    function Rename-GitBranches {
        git branch --list "my-branch-prefix/*" | Out-GridView -Title "Branches to Zoo?" -OutputMode Multiple | % { git branch -m $_.Trim() "zoo/$($_.Trim())" }
    }

`Out-GridView` gives a very simple dialog box to (multi) select branch names I want to mark finished.

I'm a branch hoarder in a squash merge repo and just prepend a `zoo/` prefix. `zoo/` generally sorts to the bottom of branch lists and I can collapse it as a folder in many UIs. I have found this useful in several ways:

1) It makes `git rebase --interactive` much easier when working with stacked branches by taking advantage of `--update-refs`. Merges do all that work for you by finding their common base/ancestor. Squash merging you have to remember which commits already merged to drop from your branch. With `--update-refs` if I find it trying to update a `zoo/` branch I know I can drop/delete every commit up to that update-ref line and also delete the update-ref.

2) I sometimes do want to find code in intermediate commits that never made it into the squashed version. Maybe I tried an experiment in a commit in a branch, then deleted that experiment in switching directions in a later commit. Squashing removes all evidence of that deleted experiment, but I can still find it if I remember the `zoo/` branch name.

All this extra work for things that merge commits gives you for free/simpler just makes me dislike squash merging repos more.

Mine's this-ish (nushell, but easily bashified or pwshd) for finding all merged, including squashed:

    let t = "origin/dev"; git for-each-ref refs/heads/ --format="%(refname:short)" | lines | where {|b| $b !~ 'dev' and (git merge-tree --write-tree $t $b | lines | first) == (git rev-parse $"($t)^{tree}") }

Does a 3-way in-mem merge against (in my case) dev. If there's code in the branch that isn't in the target it won't show up.

Pipe right to deletion if brave, or to a choice-thingy if prudent :)