Git list of branch names of specific remote

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It’s important that it should be done without grep, sed, tail or even ghc -e wrappers, only with true git power, because of their unsafeness and variation.

That is only true for git porcelain commands (see “What does the term porcelain mean in Git?”)

Use the plumbing command ls-remote, and then you will be able to filter its output.

ls-remote without parameter would still list the remote HEAD:

git@vonc-VirtualBox:~/ce/ce6/.git$ git ls-remote origin
8598d26b4a4bbe416f46087815734d49ba428523    HEAD
8598d26b4a4bbe416f46087815734d49ba428523    refs/heads/master
38325f657380ddef07fa32063c44d7d6c601c012    refs/heads/test_trap

But if you ask only for the heads of said remote:

git@vonc-VirtualBox:~/ce/ce6/.git$ git ls-remote --heads origin
8598d26b4a4bbe416f46087815734d49ba428523    refs/heads/master
38325f657380ddef07fa32063c44d7d6c601c012    refs/heads/test_trap

Final answer:

git@vonc-VirtualBox:~/ce/ce6/.git$ git ls-remote --heads origin  | sed 's?.*refs/heads/??'
master
test_trap

(Yes, it uses sed, but the output of a plumbing command is supposed to be stable enough to be parsed)

See also Git 2.23 (Q3 2019) which documents an example:

git branch -r -l '<remote>/<pattern>'
git for-each-ref 'refs/remotes/<remote>/<pattern>'

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