Question

I’ve taken a look at these previous questions already:

• Howto add a changed file to an older (not last) commit in Git
• How do I edit a previous git commit?

They don’t exactly address a particular issue though – there are other changes in the index! When running the rebase command, git complains: Cannot rebase: You have unstaged changes.

Scenario:

The commit previous to the last one (do I refer to that as "2 HEADs ago"?) was a refactor commit. I currently have in the index many unstaged changes, but only some of which I want to add to the previous to last commit.

I’m imagining the way to do this would be to:

1. stash all of my current changes
2. rebase -i to the previous to last commit (changing index and moving Head, right?)
3. load the stash into my index without changing Head (how?)
4. use add -p and commit --amend to selectively modify this old commit
5. rebase --continue to finish (updates children, moves Head back to where I started, what happens to index?)
6. then pop/clear the stash (index back to where I started).

Is this correct? If it is, how do I do step 3? If it isn’t, what should I be doing instead?

Also, note that I’m still learning about git and am still not 100% sure I’m referencing things in git (Head, index, stash, etc) properly.

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Solution:

For anyone else this may help, these are the steps I actually took:

1. git stash all of my current changes
2. git rebase -i <ID> to the parent of the previous to last commit, changing index and moving Head
3. git stash apply load the stash into my index without changing Head
   • if you have conflicts, git reset HEAD <file> to unload files staging. Make sure staging is clear.
4. use add -p and commit --amend to selectively stage changes and commit them
5. git reset --hard to discard index so it matches Head
6. git rebase --continue to finish. updates children, moves Head back to very start, but with changes
   • history is now forked into two versions. The other branch ends at the WIP previously stashed
7. then pop the stash to bring index back to where I started. The other branch is also cleared.

Answer 1

Your plan sounds good. A git stash apply or git stash pop will modify the working tree and/or index, but will not change HEAD, so you should be able to do it while in a rebase edit.