Git Branches by Date

I tend to create a huge number of branches in my git repositories, but I have a bad habit of not cleaning them up once I'm finished with them.

I found a nice command from an answer on StackOverflow that allows you to sort branches by date. I modified it slightly to also show the date when printing the branch information:

$ git for-each-ref --sort=-committerdate refs/heads/ --format='%(committerdate) %09 %(refname:short)'
Mon Jan 14 23:46:15 2013 +0000   keyfile-seek-rebase
Sat Jan 12 02:09:04 2013 +0000   perfdiag-mbit-fix
Fri Jan 11 17:38:13 2013 -0800   keyfile-seek
Thu Jan 10 01:05:43 2013 +0000   master

You can also set the date format to be relative (or other possibilities, see man git-for-each-ref):

$ git for-each-ref --sort=-committerdate refs/heads/ --format='%(committerdate:relative) %09 %(refname:short)'
3 days ago   keyfile-seek-rebase
6 days ago   perfdiag-mbit-fix
6 days ago   keyfile-seek
8 days ago   master

I added it to my .gitconfig file as an alias:

[alias]
    branchdates = for-each-ref --sort=-committerdate refs/heads/ --format='%(committerdate:relative) %09 %(refname:short)'

That allows me to just type git branchdates and get a nice listing of my local branches by date.