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git stash is great for temporarily shelving changes you’ve made to your working tree in order to move on to something else.

If you are familiar with how a (LIFO) stack works, you’ll get a basic understanding of how stashed changes are stored. Each stash operation essentially adds the working change to the top of the stack.

Viewing Stashed Content

View the contents of the most recent stash:

$ git stash show -p

List the file names in the most recent stash:

$ git stash show -p --name-only

View the contents of the second most recent stash:

$ git stash show -p stash@{1}

Keep in mind here that numbering starts at 0. Which means that git stash show -p stash@{0} is the same as git stash show -p.

You may notice that git stash show -p will not list the contents of untracked stashed files. Have a look at this Stack Overflow answer for an explanation of how this works. To view the untracked stashed files:

$ git show stash@{0}^3

View the contents of a single file in the stash:

$ git show stash@{0} -- full/path/to/filename

Creating or Modifying Stashes

Stash only specific patch changes in your working tree:

$ git stash -p

Similarly, if you supply a file argument - e.g. git stash -p file.txt - it will interactively walk you through stashing individual block changes for file.txt.

Stash everything including new (untracked) files in your working tree:

$ git stash -u

Stash everything in your working tree that has not been staged:

$ git stash --keep-index

Drop all the contents of your most recent stash:

$ git stash drop

Bring back and re-apply your most-recent stash:

$ git stash pop

Bring back and re-apply a single from from the stash:

$ git checkout stash@{0} -- full/path/to/filename

Rename the message associated with a stash:

In order for this to work, you first need to drop the contents of the stash. After dropping the contents of the stash, you can re-create the stash with your new message.

Assuming your stash looks something like this:

$ git stash list
stash@{0}: WIP on package-updates: 926957d Update a few of the local development libraries
stash@{1}: WIP on package-updates: 0404f22 Base dev package updates

Drop the stash item you wish to rename - I am choosing to drop the first item:

$ git stash drop
Dropped refs/stash@{0} (bdff30c3331bd3fbab3d515691bcd8a2eadcb57b)

Now add it back with your updated message:

$ git stash store -m "This is my updated message" bdff30c3331bd3fbab3d515691bcd8a2eadcb57b

You should now see the stash with your updated message:

$ git stash list
stash@{0}: This is my updated message
stash@{1}: WIP on package-updates: 0404f22 Base dev package updates