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We often need to pause our work and focus on something else in our development environment. Therefore, we may need to temporarily save our current work and focus on a different one. We may want to resume our original work later.

git stashThe command provides the stash functionality of Git, which allows us to temporarily save the changes we have made to the work at hand. It will enable us to restore our work later by retrieving it from the temporary cache.

We can do this temporary work saving operation multiple times. Therefore, we want to see the list of such cache entries and their contents. git stashThe command provides us with the option to browse the list of cache entries.

In this article, you will learn how to view the list of cache entries in Git. We will now illustrate this with an example.

View the list of Stash items in Git

git stashThe command allows us to record the current state of the project repository's working directory. It also allows us to save the current state of the index.

git stashThe command saves the local changes and restores the working directory to match HEADthe commit. We can perform the operation of shelving the changes on the working copy multiple times.

So, after executing caching multiple times, we now have a list of cache entries in our project's Git repository. We can git stash listview the list of cache entries using the command.

The most recent cache entry we created is cached in refs/stash. Older caches can reflogbe found in this reference. The most recently created cache entry is named stash@{0}. Its predecessor was named stash@{1}, and so on.

A cache can be referenced by specifying its index. For example, the integer nis equivalent to stash@{n}.

After creating some cache entries we can view them like this.

$ git stash list
stash@{0}: WIP on main: b14f387 some work
stash@{1}: WIP on main: b14f387 some other work
stash@{2}: WIP on main: b14f387 some older work

As shown above, we can mainsee a list of three stash entries in the Git repository's branch. We can also view the contents of each stash entry.

To see the files in the latest cache entry, we need to follow.

$ git stash show
 test.txt | 4 ++++
 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+)

We can see that test.txtRecently has been hidden.

To see the changes to the files in the most recent stash entry, we need to do the following.

$ git stash show -p
diff --git a/test.txt b/test.txt
index fae50f7..f60e878 100644
--- a/test.txt
+++ b/test.txt
@@ -73,4 +73,16 This test
 
 some old text
 
+ some new text
+1. Add this
+2. Add that
+

git stash showThe command displays the changes recorded in a cache entry as the difference between the cache contents and the commit that was returned when the cache entry was first created.

We can also view a specific cache using its name. We need to git stash show -p <named-stash>provide the name in .

So, to view stash@{1}the cache entry named , we would execute the following command.

$ git stash show -p stash@{1}

We can also see cache entries across branches, not just the current one. To do this, we need to execute the following command.

$ git stash list --all

We can also view the cache history in Git by date range. We need to use the command with option -r --beforeor --after-r git stash list.

We can execute the command with date range as follows.

$ git stash list --before 3.days.ago
$ git stash list --after 2.days.ago

We can -statsummarize the changes in each element of git stash history using -r option. As shown below, we can -statexecute the command using -r option.

$ git stash list --stat

So, we showed how to view a list of cache entries in Git.