I want to inspect a stash and find out what changes it would make if I applied it to working tree in its current state.
I know I can do a git diff on the stash, but this shows me all the differences between the working tree and the stash, whereas I'm just interested to know what the stash apply is going to change.
The following command can be used to extract diff of stashed change against any other stash or commit or branch or HEAD.
git stash show
git show
git diff
git difftool
Let’s see, how we can use each of the above mentioned commands.
git stash showThe simple command git stash show gives very brief summary of changes of file, but will not show the diff of changes against current HEAD.
The command git-show is used to see various types of objects.
The command git-show is not only used to visualize stash changes, but also used to see one or more objects like blobs, trees, tags and commits.
The command git-diff is also one of common command which is used to show changes between commits, commit and working tree, etc.
By default, git diff will show the diff of selected stash against(modified files) current state of repository unless other stash reference or commit is specified.
To get difference between top most stash stash@{0} and master branch:
git diff stash@{0} master
Only display the names of file not diff of changes:
git diff --name-only stash@{0} master
See the diff between selected stashes for a selected file:
git diff stash@{0}^1 stash@{0} -- <filename>
git difftoolThe command git-difftool can also be used to find diff between selected stash and selected commit or branch or stash
See the difference between latest two stashes:
git difftool stash@{0} stash@{0}^1
git difftool --dir-diff stash@{0} stash@{0}^1
Summary:
Commands which are useful to extract the diff from selected stash: git stash show, git show, git diff, git difftool.
See difference using command git stash show,
git stash show -p stash@{0}
See the changes in the stash using command git show,
git show stash@{1}
See the difference between latest stash and selected commit using command git diff,
git diff stash@{0} <commit-hash>
References:
https://howto.lintel.in/how-to-see-stashed-changes-using-git-stash/
When this question was first asked, this may not have been an option, but, if you use PyCharm, you can use the UnStash Changes tool (VCS->Git->UnStash Changes...). This allows you to view the list of stashed changes, as well as pop, drop, clear, or apply (into a new branch if desired):
and view the changed files per stash:
as well as diffs per file. In the diffs you can cherry-pick individual changes to apply from the stashed changes to the working branch (using the left-pointing chevron):
yes the best way to see what is modified is to save in file like that:
git stash show -p stash@{0} > stash.txt
In additional to the existing answers which suggests using (to show the diff of the third-to-last stash)
git stash show -p stash@{2}
Note that in the git-stash documentation, it is written that
Stashes may also be referenced by specifying just the stash index (e.g. the integer
nis equivalent tostash@{n}).
Therefore it's also possible to use (this is equivalent to the command above)
git stash show -p 2
Which should also avoid some Powershell issues.
View list of stashed changes
git stash list
For viewing list of files changed in a particular stash
git stash show -p stash@{0} --name-only
For viewing a particular file in stash
git show stash@{0} path/to/file
I like how gitk can show you exactly what was untracked or sitting in the index, but by default it will show those stash "commits" in the middle of all your other commits on the current branch.
The trick is to run gitk as follows:
gitk "stash@{0}^!"
(The quoting is there to make it work in Powershell but this way it should still work in other shells as well.)
If you look up this syntax in the gitrevisions help page you'll find the following:
The
r1^!notation includes commit r1 but excludes all of its parents. By itself, this notation denotes the single commit r1.
This will apparently put gitk in such a mode that only the immediate parents of the selected commit are shown, which is exactly what I like.
If you want to take this further and list all stashes then you can run this:
gitk `git stash list '--pretty=format:%gd^!'`
(Those single quotes inside the backticks are necessary to appease Bash, otherwise it complains about the exclamation mark)
If you are on Windows and using cmd or Powershell:
gitk "--argscmd=git stash list --pretty=format:%gd^!"
Several answers have mentioned the -p (or --patch) flag on git stash show
However, it might also be worth mentioning that you can make this the default behaviour when showing a Git stash (ie. git stash show stash@{0}), either by using git config:
git config --global stash.showPatch true
...or in your .gitconfig file:
[stash]
showPatch = true
This makes git stash show behave like git show by default. If and when you do just want to see the diffstat (ie. summary of lines added / deleted), you can still see that via the --stat flag (again, like with git show):
git stash show --stat stash@{0}
File names only:
for i in $(git stash list --format="%gd") ; do echo "======$i======"; git stash show $i; done
Full file contents in all stashes:
for i in $(git stash list --format="%gd") ; do echo "======$i======"; git stash show -p $i; done
You will get colorized diff output that you can page with space (forward) and b (backwards), and q to close the pager for the current stash. If you would rather have it in a file then append > stashes.diff to the command.