Git remote branch deleted, but still it appears in 'branch -a'

Question

Let's say I had a branch named coolbranch in my repository.

Now, I decided to delete it (both remotely and locally) with:

git push origin :coolbranch
git branch -D coolbranch

Great! Now the branch is really deleted.

But when I run

git branch -a

I still get:

remotes/origin/coolbranch

Something to notice, is that when I clone a new repository, everything is fine and git branch -a doesn't show the branch.

I want to know - is there a way to delete the branch from the branch -a list without cloning a new instance?

Answer 1

git remote prune origin, as suggested in the other answer, will remove all such stale branches. That's probably what you'd want in most cases, but if you want to just remove that particular remote-tracking branch, you should do:

git branch -d -r origin/coolbranch

(The -r is easy to forget...)

-r in this case will "List or delete (if used with -d) the remote-tracking branches." according to the Git documentation found here: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-branch