Git Stash

When you work with git every day there are a lot of situations where you start working on something and in the middle of the process you have to stop working on your current task and move to a different branch to check something else, fix some urgent bug or to help your colleague or do something completely different from your task. In these situations git stash is a great feature that git offers.

With git stash command you can temporarily store all changes that you've made in your Working Directory and in your index and safely move to work on a different task. Be aware that by running git stash git will not store new files that you add to your Working Directory and files that are ignored by git, to store new files you have to use -u or --include-untracked option.

git stash becomes more interesting if you dig a bit deeper and if you ask your self what is git stash in a more technical view. It's the reference that points to the git merge commit. You can check this out with git show-ref command which lists all references in your local repository.

➜  git-basics-beginners git:(master) git show-ref | grep stash
03848026bd57579369a7c22777f9e79a0f307ed7 refs/stash

and if you then run git cat-file -t this command will show type information on particular git object.

➜  git-basics-beginners git:(master) git cat-file -t 03848026bd57579369a7c22777f9e79a0f307ed7
commit

you can see that it is a commit. Now to see that it is a merge commit you can run:

git show stash@{0}

➜  git-basics-beginners git:(master) git --no-pager show stash@{0}
commit 03848026bd57579369a7c22777f9e79a0f307ed7 (refs/stash)
Merge: 45c5d9e e61a73a
Author: Nemanja <nemanjavasa@gmail.com>
Date:   Mon Jun 22 21:05:05 2020 +0200

    On master: WIP Working on Git Stash section

diff --cc README.md
index 5f0b860,5f0b860..af03466
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@@ -460,20 -460,20 +460,60 @@@ To test, set employment date to less th

If you're asking you self why git is creating merge commit when stashing, answer is rather simple. If you remember from the beginning of this section git stash can store changes that are in the Staging Area and changes that are unstaged as well, and since it is possible that your Staging Area and your Working Directory contain the same file that has been changed, git needs a way to store these changes separately so it can apply them later when you use git stash pop OR git stash apply.

Some useful commands related to git stash:

$ git stash list - shows a list of all existing stashes

$ git stash - it will stash the changes in the memory

$ git stash -u - to stash untracked as well as tracked files

$ git stash show - to show the diff of stash

$ git stash save <stash-message> - stash changes with message

$ git stash pop - will take stashed change and also remove it from stash

$ git stash apply - will take stashed change but also keep it in the stash

$ git stash drop stash@{<stash-number>} - command for deleting particular stash

$ git stash clean - remove all stashed changes