Today I’m going to share a little information about the Stashing and Cleaning in GIT.

While working in environment we all face some messy state, when we are in middle of some new project and we want to checkout to another branch to solve any high priority bug or else. The problem is, we cant commit the half done code changes. After some hours we need to get back to this point.

So in this case, the problem will be solved with git stash command.

Stashing

It takes the modified file and staged changes and saves it on the stack. And you can reapply your stashed changes anytime.

To know the changes you have made in your files, just try with git status command.

$ git status
On branch master
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/master'.

Changes not staged for commit:
  (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
  (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)

        modified:   MyDoc.txt

no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

In the above code snippet, MyDoc.txt file is modified so now we want to checkout the new branch, so we will stash the changes.

To push the changes into the stash, run git stash or git stash push command.

$ git stash
Saved working directory and index state WIP on master: 5bf464e My New Document

So now the current working branch got cleaned.

$ git status
On branch master
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/master'.

nothing to commit, working tree clean

To view the list of stashed changes use git stash list:

$ git stash list
stash@{0}: WIP on master: 43fbcc0 Content updated
stash@{1}: WIP on master: f41583a Changes done
stash@{2}: WIP on master: 5bf464e My New Document
stash@{3}: WIP on master: 5bf464e My New Document

In this case, you can reapply the stashed changes using the git stash apply. If you want to apply the particular stashed changes you can mention like this git stash apply stash@{2}. If you don’t specifies any stash Git will apply the most recent stashed changes.

$ git stash apply
On branch master
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/master'.

Changes not staged for commit:
  (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
  (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)

        modified:   MyDoc.txt

no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

This git stash apply will doesn’t remove the changes from stack. git stash pop you can use this to apply your stash and to drop it from the stack immediately.

To remove it, you can run git stash drop with the name of the stash to remove:

$ git stash drop stash@{2}
Dropped stash@{2} (f1f438ec1e2c8a59d9774f926e91416a4c7fb1e0)

If not sure about the which stash you want to pop to your working directory, you can use git stash show stash@{2} -t . It will show you the content stashed.

$ git stash show stash@{2} -t
diff --git a/MyDoc.txt b/MyDoc.txt
index a832b34..ec1e56b 100644
--- a/MyDoc.txt
+++ b/MyDoc.txt
@@ -1 +1,2 @@
-Hai
\ No newline at end of file
+Hai
+File is edited.
\ No newline at end of file

Cleaning

Sometimes our working directory would be filled up with unwanted files, so that’s where git clean command would be useful. It will remove the untracked files from local.

Always make sure once when you deleting the unwanted files. Use git clean -n to see what are file going to be deleted.

$ git clean -n
Would remove MyNewDoc2.txt

Once you OK with the files that are going to be delete you can run git clean -f

$ git clean -f
Removing MyNewDoc2.txt

Below are some more options to do the cleaning,

• To remove directories, run git clean -f -d or git clean -fd
• To remove ignored files, run git clean -f -X or git clean -fX
• To remove ignored and non-ignored files, run git clean -f -x or git clean -fx

Note the case difference on the X for the two latter commands.

Happy Learning 🙂