Question

I’ve deleted a remote branch with the following command:

git push le_remote :le_dead_branch

And the branch was removed with success on the remote.
But after checking the size of the git repo I found out that probably the files, exclusive to that specific branch, were (probably) still there. This, so I believe, is due to the fact that what I’ve deleted was the ref to that specific state, but not the files, and my question is: how can I actually remove the files from the filesystem?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You need to go to the remote repository and do

git reflog expire --expire-unreachable=now --all
git prune
git repack -a -d

Only then will the objects associated with that branch get pruned.