Having trouble deleting a local branch even after checkout to another branch

Question

I'm trying to delete my local branch and tried most of the solutions I found on here which is to checkout to another branch and then run git branch -D (or -d) <my_branch> . I tried that but I am still getting the same error that states "Cannot delete branch 'my_branch' checked out at 'my_path'

How I got myself in this situation: I branched off of my develop branch by doing git worktree add -b branch_name ../project_name develop . Then I realized I wanted to change my branch name so I deleted the entire directory first by using rm- rf . Now my_path is pointing to a deleted directory so I'm not sure what to do now. Help will be appreciated. I'm running on Windows 7 using Git Bash

Things I have tried:

1. Restarting my computer
2. Reinstalling Git Bash
3. Checkout to another branch and try git branch -d and git branch -D

Screenshot of error: The (virtualBDD) is my virtual environment. You can ignore that.

Answer 1

Did a bit more browsing and came across this answer that uses git worktree prune to remove information on (non-locked) worktrees that no longer exist. This essentially removed my worktree from git worktree list and then I proceeded to do git branch -d my_branch . This solved my issue. Thanks to everyone that helped.

Answer 2

You have a worktree for the branch in question checked out in another location and you can't delete that branch until you've removed the worktree.

Git doesn't let you remove a branch that has a worktree associated with it, since that would leave the worktree in a useless and broken state. If you want to delete the branch, you first need to use git worktree remove to remove the given worktree, possibly with -f , and then you'll be able to delete the branch. If you're not sure where your worktree is, you can use git worktree list to find it.