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I have a project with lots of submodules for some specific reason. I just want to know which branches exist for each submodule. I know that I could initialize each submodule with 

git submodule update --init

and perform a 

git ls-remote --heads {URL}

on each submodule to get the currently existing branches of that submodule (git branch -r also lists already deleted branches). But since our project exists of many submodules the initialization above needs a lot of time on the first run. Is there a way to get the existing branches without initializing the submodules?

VonC
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heinkunibert
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1 Answers1

3

As mentioned in "List submodules in a git repository", you could get the url directly from the .gitmodules file.

grep url .gitmodules | sed 's/.*= //'

Once you have extracted the url, you can do the git ls-remote --heads {URL} without having to initialize the submodules.

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VonC
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