Git - Rename multiple branches

Question

Here we have a git repo which has multiple branches which start with the same prefix just like this:

pfx.branchName1  
pfx.branchName2  
pfx.branchName3  
...

So the question is how to quickly remove all the prefixes ("pfx.") from all the branches and get something like this:

branchName1  
branchName2  
branchName3  
... 

Answer 1

Found an universal command that searches for the branches which contain our desired string (eg "StringToFind" ) and renames by replacing that part with the string we want (eg "ReplaceWith" ):

git branch | grep "StringToFind" | awk '{original=$1; sub("StringToFind","ReplaceWith"); print original, $1}' | xargs -n 2 git branch -m

Note: Before starting renaming we can run this command to see which branches are going to be renamed (just for convenience):

git branch | grep "StringToFind" | awk '{original=$1; sub("StringToFind","ReplaceWith"); print original, "->" , $1}'  

So, for our case , use this for removing prefix:

git branch | grep "pfx." | awk '{original=$1; sub("pfx.",""); print original, $1}' | xargs -n 2 git branch -m  

And this, for checking before removing:

git branch | grep "pfx." | awk '{original=$1; sub("pfx.",""); print original, "->", $1}'

Answer 2

You can filter the branch names from the output of git branch , and then use a Bash loop with substitution to perform the renames:

git branch | sed -e 's/..//' | grep '^pfx\.' | while read b; do git branch -m "$b" "${b#pfx.}"; done

Or slightly more compactly but perhaps harder to read:

git branch | sed -ne 's/^..pfx\.//p' | while read b; do git branch -m "pfx.$b" "$b"; done