How to reverse apply a stash

Question

I have a small patch saved away in my git stash   I ve applied it to my working copy using git stash apply   Now  I d like to back out those changes by reverse applying the patch  kind of like what git revert would do but against the stash    Does anyone know how to do this   Clarification  There are other changes in my working copy   My particular case is hard to describe but you can imagine some debugging or experimental code that s in the stash   Now it s mixed in my working copy with some other changes and I d like to see the effect with and without the changes from the stash   It doesn t look like stash supports this currently  but a git stash apply --reverse would be a nice feature

User · Answer

The V1 git man page had a reference about un-applying a stash. The excerpt is below.

The newer V2 git man page doesn't include any reference to un-applying a stash but the below still works well

Un-applying a Stash In some use case scenarios you might want to apply stashed changes, do some work, but then un-apply those changes that originally came from the stash. Git does not provide such a stash un-apply command, but it is possible to achieve the effect by simply retrieving the patch associated with a stash and applying it in reverse:

$ git stash show -p stash@{0} | git apply -R

Again, if you don’t specify a stash, Git assumes the most recent stash:

$ git stash show -p | git apply -R

You may want to create an alias and effectively add a stash-unapply command to your Git. For example:

$ git config --global alias.stash-unapply '!git stash show -p | git apply -R'
$ git stash apply
$ #... work work work
$ git stash-unapply

User · Answer

git checkout -f   will remove any non-commit changes

User · Answer

This is long over due  but if i interpret the problem correctly i have found a simple solution  note  this is an explanation in my own terminology   git stash  save  will save away current changes and set your current branch to the  clean state   git stash list gives something like  stash  0   On develop  saved testing-stuff  git apply stash  0  will set current branch as before stash  save   git checkout   Will set current branch as after stash  save   The code that is saved in the stash is not lost  it can be found by git apply stash  0  again    Anywhay  this worked for me

User · Answer

git stash save  takes your working directory state  and your index state  and stashes them away  setting index and working area to HEAD version    git stash apply brings back those changes  so git reset --hard would remove them again    git stash pop brings back those changes and removes top stashed change  so git stash  save  would return to previous  pre-pop  state in this case

User · Answer

git stash show -p   git apply --reverse  Warning  that would not in every case   quot git apply -R quot  man  did not handle patches that touch the same path twice correctly  which has been corrected with Git 2 30  Q1 2021   This is most relevant in a patch that changes a path from a regular file to a symbolic link  and vice versa   See commit b0f266d  20 Oct 2020  by Jonathan Tan  jhowtan    Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit c23cd78  02 Nov 2020   apply  when -R  also reverse list of sections Helped-by  Junio C Hamano Signed-off-by  Jonathan Tan   A patch changing a symlink into a file is written with 2 sections  in the code  represented as  quot struct patch quot    firstly  the deletion of the symlink  and secondly  the creation of the file  When applying that patch with -R  the sections are reversed  so we get   1  creation of a symlink  then  2  deletion of a file  This causes an issue when the  quot deletion of a file quot  section is checked  because Git observes that the so-called file is not a file but a symlink  resulting in a  quot wrong type quot  error message  What we want is   1  deletion of a file  then  2  creation of a symlink  In the code  this is reflected in the behavior of previous patch   when invoked from check preimage   when the deletion is checked  Creation then deletion means that when the deletion is checked  previous patch   returns the creation section  triggering a mode conflict resulting in the  quot wrong type quot  error message  But deletion then creation means that when the deletion is checked  previous patch   returns NULL  so the deletion mode is checked against lstat  which is what we want  There are also other ways a patch can contain 2 sections referencing the same file  for example  in 7a07841c0b   quot git-apply  handle a patch that touches the same path more than once better quot   2008-06-27  Git v1 6 0-rc0 -- merge    quot git apply -R quot  man  fails in the same way  and this commit makes this case succeed  Therefore  when building the list of sections  build them in reverse order  by adding to the front of the list instead of the back  when -R is passed

User · Answer

I had a similar issue myself  I think all you need to do is git reset --hard and you will not lose your changes or any untracked changes  If you read the docs in git stash --help it states that apply is  quot Like pop  but do not remove the state from the stash list quot  so the state still resides there  you can get it back  Alternatively  if you have no conflicts  you can just git stash again after testing your changes  If you do have conflicts  don t worry  git reset --hard won t lose them  as  quot Applying the state can fail with conflicts  in this case  it is not removed from the stash list  You need to resolve the conflicts by hand and call git stash drop manually afterwards  quot

User · Answer

This is in addition to the above answers but adds search for the git stash based on the message as the stash number can change when new stashes are saved  I have written a couple of bash functions   apply      if     1     then     git stash apply  git stash list   grep -oPm1                1        fi   remove      if     1     then     git stash show -p  git stash list   grep -oPm1                1        git apply -R     git status   fi      Create stash with name  message    git stash save  my stash  To appply named   apply  my stash  To remove named stash   remove  my stash

User · Answer

In addition to  Greg Bacon answer  in case binary files were added to the index and were part of the stash using  git stash show -p   git apply --reverse   may result in   error  cannot apply binary patch to   lt YOUR NEW FILE gt   without full index line error   lt YOUR NEW FILE gt   patch does not apply   Adding --binary resolves the issue  but unfortunately haven t figured out why yet    git stash show -p --binary   git apply --reverse

User · Answer

According to the git-stash manpage   A stash is represented as a commit whose tree records the state of the working directory  and its first parent is the commit at HEAD when the stash was created   and git stash show -p gives us  the changes recorded in the stash as a diff between the stashed state and its original parent   To keep your other changes intact  use git stash show -p   patch --reverse as in the following     git init Initialized empty Git repository in  tmp repo  git     echo Hello  world  gt messages    git add messages    git commit -am  Initial commit   master  root-commit    created 1ff2478   Initial commit   1 files changed  1 insertions     0 deletions -   create mode 100644 messages    echo Hello again  gt  gt messages    git stash    git status   On branch master nothing to commit  working directory clean     git stash apply   On branch master   Changed but not updated       use  git add  lt file gt      to update what will be committed       use  git checkout --  lt file gt      to discard changes in working directory            modified    messages   no changes added to commit  use  git add  and or  git commit -a      echo Howdy all  gt  gt messages    git diff diff --git a messages b messages index a5c1966  eade523 100644 --- a messages     b messages    -1  1 3     Hello  world  Hello again  Howdy all    git stash show -p   patch --reverse patching file messages Hunk  1 succeeded at 1 with fuzz 1     git diff diff --git a messages b messages index a5c1966  364fc91 100644 --- a messages     b messages    -1  1 2     Hello  world  Howdy all   Edit   A light improvement to this is to use git apply in place of patch   git stash show -p   git apply --reverse   Alternatively  you can also use git apply -R as a shorthand to git apply --reverse   I ve been finding this really handy lately

User · Answer

You can follow the image i shared to unstash if u accidentally tapped stashing

User · Answer

How to reverse apply a stash    Apart from what others have mentioned  easiest way is first do  git reset HEAD   and then checkout all local changes  git checkout

[git] How to reverse apply a stash?

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