Git Stash

Git stash saves uncommitted changes to a private shelf and resets the working tree to the last Commit, so you can switch to something else and come back later. The classic situation: you're halfway through a change when an urgent bug report arrives. Your work isn't ready to commit, but you need a clean tree to check out another branch. git stash puts the changes aside; git stash pop brings them back.

Under the hood, a stash is an ordinary commit, or rather two or three of them: one recording the working tree, one recording the staging area, and optionally one for untracked files. They aren't on any branch. Git keeps them on a special reference, refs/stash, and its Reflog holds the list of stashes, newest first. That's why stash@{0} uses the same syntax as reflog entries.

Common operations:

• git stash push -m "message" saves with a description. Without one, stashes are labeled only with the branch and commit they were made on, and a pile of them quickly becomes unreadable.
• git stash list shows the shelf. git stash show -p shows a stash as a Diff.
• git stash apply restores changes but keeps the stash; pop restores and drops it.
• git stash -u includes untracked files, which are otherwise left behind.
• git stash branch name creates a branch from the commit where the stash was made and applies it there, avoiding conflicts if the original branch has moved on.

Applying a stash is a merge, so it can produce a Merge Conflict when the branch has changed since. If pop hits a conflict, it doesn't drop the stash, so nothing is lost.

Stashes are easy to forget. They don't show in git status or in branch lists, they aren't pushed to the remote, and old ones accumulate silently. A dropped stash can usually still be recovered for a while, because its commit lingers as an unreachable object until garbage collection, but finding it means hunting through dangling commits.

For anything longer than a quick interruption, alternatives often work better:

• A work-in-progress commit on the feature branch, later amended or squashed away before the Pull Request. It's visible, pushable, and shows up in history; see Squash Merge.
• A Git Worktree, a second working directory on another branch. The urgent fix happens there, and the half-finished work is never disturbed at all.
• A feature flag that lets unfinished code merge safely behind a switch, the approach of Trunk-Based Development.

Stash still earns daily use for small moves: pulling with a dirty tree, carrying a change to a different branch, or briefly testing whether a bug exists without your edits. Treat it as a short-term shelf rather than storage, and the forgotten-stash problem largely goes away.