I use Git fairly extensively and one of the features I use and love is stash. The stash command allows you to take point-in-time snapshots of development and “stash” them away. The source tree is then returned to the current commit.

So let’s take a quick example. Stashing is something I particularly do when I want to pull changes into a dirty tree.  I am working on a problem and someone over there has committed something that changes the environment. I don’t want to commit my half-done work but I do want to keep it whilst I add the other commits into my tree.  So I type:

$ git stash

This will “stash” away the changes in my dirty tree and leave it clean at the last commit.

I can then, for example, cherry-pick in a commit and then use git stash pop to add back in my changes.

$ git cherry-pick 9cc0589
$ git stash pop


This will re-apply my stashed changes on top of the new commit and remove the stash. If this causes conflicts then you need to edit them by hand.

You can store more than one stash too – the last operations will just pluck the last stash from the list – but you can store a collection. You can see what stashes are available by using:

$ git stash list
stash@{0}: WIP on features/master/dailytask: 2d74623... Added daily build task to Rakefile
stash@{1}: WIP on features/master/dailytask: 2d74623... Added daily build task to Rakefile
stash@{2}: WIP on master: f13f08d... Minor fix to URL for LDAP nodes documentation


You could then apply a particular stash by specifying the stash’s ID.

$ git stash pop stash@{2}

You can see more features and options at the git-stash man page.

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