Earlier, we said that Git maintains copies of the branches in the upstream repo, as well as manages your local branches. You can see all these branches with ‘git branch -a’:
$ git branch -a -| gawk-4.1-stable -| * master -| remotes/origin/HEAD -> origin/master -| remotes/origin/dead-branches/async-events -| … -| remotes/origin/feature/api-mpfr -| remotes/origin/feature/array-iface -| remotes/origin/feature/fix-comments -| …
You’ll note that what we’ve referred to as ‘origin/’ branches
appear in the output with an additional prefix: ‘remotes/’.
Up to this point, we’ve treated Git as if it allowed only a single
upstream repository. But in fact, you can configure it to use more
than one. All the known upstream repositories are grouped under
the ‘remotes/’ prefix, with remotes/origin being the one
from which you initially cloned your local repository.
The ability to work with multiple upstream repositories is an
advanced one; gawk development does not make use of it.
The intent of this subsection is to explain the output
from ‘git branch -a’, nothing more.