Re: Dangers of reset --hard (Re: Implicit stashes)

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Jun 30, 2010, 16:12 UTC
Message-ID: <20100630161217.GE18813@burratino>
In-Reply-To: <1277885972.2498.25.camel@wpalmer.simply-domain>

Will Palmer wrote:

> I tend to want "do a git reset --hard, but fail if anything would be
> lost".

At the risk of being redundant: try git reset --keep. If it succeeds, you can use git diff --cached HEAD and git diff to check how close it was to being equivalent to a hard reset.

> The use-case here is that when I reset --hard, I want a
> completely clean copy- but I don't want to accidentally lose anything.

There is one case when I truly want a completely clean copy (including no untracked files): when I am testing and a bit paranoid. For that, I do something like the following:

 ; mkdir /tmp/test-dir
 ; git archive HEAD | (cd /tmp/test-dir && tar -xf -)
 ; cd /tmp/test-dir

and work from there. I would not be surprised if the needs of your case are different, though.