Question

Git stash seems to do a lot of what I want, except that it is a little hard to script, as the if you have no changes, then git stash; git stash pop will do something different than if you do have changes in your repository.

It appears that git stash create is the answer to that problem, and everything works, except for one thing… I can’t get rid of the created stash. Is there any way to get rid of the stash?

To make it 100% clear what I am doing:

Create the stash:

~/tmp/a(master) $ git stash create 
60629375d0eb12348f9d31933dd348ad0f038435
~/tmp/a(master) $ git st
# On branch master
# Changes to be committed:
#   (use "git reset HEAD <file>..." to unstage)
#
#   new file:   b
#
~/tmp/a(master) $ git reset --hard
HEAD is now at 555d572 log message

Use the stash:

~/tmp/a(master) $ git apply 60629375d0eb12348f9d31933dd348ad0f038435
fatal: can't open patch '60629375d0eb12348f9d31933dd348ad0f038435': No such file or directory
~/tmp/a(master) $ git stash apply 60629375d0eb12348f9d31933dd348ad0f038435
# On branch master
# Changes to be committed:
#   (use "git reset HEAD <file>..." to unstage)
#
#   new file:   b
#

Delete the stash: (except that this last bit doesn’t work)

~/tmp/a(master) $ git stash drop !$
git stash drop 60629375d0eb12348f9d31933dd348ad0f038435
'60629375d0eb12348f9d31933dd348ad0f038435' is not a stash reference

Answer 1

To delete a normal stash created with git stash , you want git stash drop or git stash drop stash@{n}. See below for more details.

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You don’t need to delete a stash created with git stash create. From the docs:

Create a stash entry (which is a regular commit object) and return its object name, without storing it anywhere in the ref namespace. This is intended to be useful for scripts. It is probably not the command you want to use; see “save” above.

Since nothing references the stash commit, it will get garbage collected eventually.

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A stash created with git stash or git stash save is saved to refs/stash, and can be deleted with git stash drop. As with all Git objects, the actual stash contents aren’t deleted from your computer until a gc prunes those objects after they expire (default is 2 weeks later).

Older stashes are saved in the refs/stash reflog (try cat .git/logs/refs/stash), and can be deleted with git stash drop stash@{n}, where n is the number shown by git stash list.