How to remove remote origin/refs/heads/master

git remote-branch
Peter Smit picture Peter Smit · Feb 3, 2011 · Viewed 34.5k times · Source

Don't ask me how but I managed to get accidentally the following remote branches in a git repository:

$ git branch -r
  origin/HEAD -> origin/master
  origin/master
  origin/refs/heads/master

All are pointing to the same commit. How can I remove the unnecessary listing for origin/refs/heads/master?

I tried to do the following

$ git push origin :refs/heads/master
error: dst refspec refs/heads/master matches more than one.

But as shown, this gives an error.

Answer

Cascabel picture Cascabel · Feb 3, 2011

That's not actually a branch on the remote - it's just a local ref that claims to be representing something on the remote, just as origin/master represents the master branch on the remote. The full name of the ref is refs/remotes/origin/refs/heads/master. All you have to do to delete it is:

git branch -r -d origin/refs/heads/master

It's vaguely possible that you managed to push this as well (but you'd have had to try extra hard to do so). If you did, I'd simply listing the refs of origin:

git ls-remote origin

and then, if there's anything stupid there, using git push origin :<refname> to get rid of it.

P.S. If this doesn't do it for you, you're going to want to use git for-each-ref to see all of your refs, and possibly git ls-remote origin to see all the remote ones, and track down exactly which things don't belong, with their fully qualified refnames.

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