JIYIK CN >

Sometimes while using Git, we come across a situation where we want to pull the latest changes from the remote repository and it conflicts with the existing modifications or files, then we have to push those files to the storage.

Git provides us with a feature to store snapshots of the changes we make without committing them to our repository, this area of ​​Git is called Stash.

It is not associated with our working tree, nor with the staging area. This is a very effective function to temporarily save our changes and clean up the working tree to start a new work.

Later depending on our needs, we can omit or revert the changes we made and then reapply them in a new branch or another branch.

This article will discuss git stash and how to overcome messy Git situations when restoring a stash. This function is used when we make changes to a branch that we don't want to commit, but we want to switch to another branch.

Storing changes in Git

In order to save the changes in storage for any purpose, we will execute the command:

$ git stash save "optional message for yourself"

This command mentioned above will save our changes and return them to the working directory. The stashed changes can be obtained from any branch in this repository.

Viewing stashed changes in Git

To view the stashed changelist, we will execute the command:

$ git stash list

As mentioned before, this command will stash@{0}show us a list of saved changes in the format of . stash@{0}represents the name of the stash and the curly brackets ( ) containing a number { }are the index of that stash.

If we have a lot of stashed changes, each collection will have a different index depending on the order they were saved.

If we forget what changes we made in the stash , we can view them by the following command. The following command will show us all the past changes in the stash .

$ git stash show stash@{0}

Restore stashed changes in Git

There are two ways to restore or retrieve our stashed changes from the stashed bucket and apply them to the current branch we are going to work on in future. Both the commands are mentioned below one by one:

Git Staging Application

With the command mentioned below we can apply the changes leaving a copy in the storage so we can use it in the future if we want to use it for any reason.

$ git stash apply STASH-NAME

If there are multiple stashes , we can specifically mention the name of the stash so that we will get only the specified stash .

$ git stash apply

If we don't enter a name, Git will automatically apply the last pushed stash on top.

Git stash pop

We can also apply the changes through the command mentioned below, but this command will delete the files from the storage and we will not be able to use them later.

$ git stash pop STASH-NAME

Removing stashed changes in Git

Whenever we want to remove the stashed changes after applying them, we will execute the following command. Despite this, this command will remove all changes from the storage and we will no longer be able to use them later:

$ git stash drop STASH-NAME

To clean the entire storage area, we will run the following command:

$ git stash clear