fatal: bad config file line in .gitconfig file when making an alias for deleting merged branches

Question

Can anyone help me figure out what is wrong with this line in the .gitconfig file?

[alias]
db = !git branch --merged | grep -v "\*" | xargs -n 1 git branch -d

The command by itself works, I was following along this post ( How can I delete all git branches which have been merged? )

But when I run the alias 'git db' it will fail with 'fatal: bad config file line 22' which points to that line in my .gitconfig file

Answer 1

To expand on the comment by MrTux: quotes ( "" ) have special meaning in a Git config file. If you want to use them in a config value, you have to escape them and then quote the entire value, like this:

db = "!git branch --merged | grep -v \"*\" | xargs -n 1 git branch -d"