How to reverse apply a stash?

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According to the git-stash manpage, “A stash is represented as a commit whose tree records the state of the working directory, and its first parent is the commit at HEAD when the stash was created,” and git stash show -p gives us “the changes recorded in the stash as a diff between the stashed state and its original parent.

To keep your other changes intact, use git stash show -p | patch --reverse as in the following:

$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in /tmp/repo/.git/

$ echo Hello, world >messages

$ git add messages

$ git commit -am 'Initial commit'
[master (root-commit)]: created 1ff2478: "Initial commit"
 1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 messages

$ echo Hello again >>messages

$ git stash

$ git status
# On branch master
nothing to commit (working directory clean)

$ git stash apply
# On branch master
# Changed but not updated:
#   (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
#   (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)
#
#       modified:   messages
#
no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

$ echo Howdy all >>messages

$ git diff
diff --git a/messages b/messages
index a5c1966..eade523 100644
--- a/messages
+++ b/messages
@@ -1 +1,3 @@
 Hello, world
+Hello again
+Howdy all

$ git stash show -p | patch --reverse
patching file messages
Hunk #1 succeeded at 1 with fuzz 1.

$ git diff
diff --git a/messages b/messages
index a5c1966..364fc91 100644
--- a/messages
+++ b/messages
@@ -1 +1,2 @@
 Hello, world
+Howdy all

Edit:

A light improvement to this is to use git apply in place of patch:

git stash show -p | git apply --reverse

Alternatively, you can also use git apply -R as a shorthand to git apply --reverse.

I’ve been finding this really handy lately…

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