Re: Lost files after git stash && git stash pop

From: Torsten Bögershausen <tboegi@web.de>
Date: Jul 22, 2023, 21:44 UTC
Message-ID: <20230722214433.3xfoebf7my5wsihf@tb-raspi4>
In-Reply-To: <5260C6A0-C53C-4F6D-B899-6AD8601F8458@gmail.com>

On Fri, Jul 21, 2023 at 07:31:53PM +0200, Till Friebe wrote:

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> Thank you for filling out a Git bug report!
> Please answer the following questions to help us understand your issue.
>
> What did you do before the bug happened? (Steps to reproduce your issue)
> ```
> git init
> mkdir README
> touch README/README
> git add .
> git commit -m "Init project"
> echo "Test" > README/README
> mv README/README README2
> rmdir README
> mv README2 README
> git stash
> git stash pop
> ```
>
> What did you expect to happen? (Expected behavior)
> I expected that after the `git stash pop` the README file would be back.
>
> What happened instead? (Actual behavior)
> This README with "Test" file was deleted and I lost 5 hours of work.

That is always sad to hear, when work is lost.

However, I personally wonder if this is a bug or not. First, Git is told to track a file called README/README Then the file is removed, without telling Git. And a new, unkown file appers on disk (which collides with the name of the directory)

Using this sequence could have told Git, what is going on: git mv README/README README2 rmdir README git mv README2 README

(a temporary branch may be checked out, with the option
 to merge-squash the final result)

An other alternative could be to tell `git stash` to care about untracked file(s):

git stash -u git stash pop

Which will refuse to apply the stash.

A third alternative could be to keep the file inside an editor, to have the content still available.

However, it would/could be nice, if files are not simply deleted, but saved into a "lost+found" folder, or a wastebasket kind of thing.

But which files ? Those that are untracked ? They may be important (local config files, passwords, help scripts, ...) or not (.o files from a C compiler).

In some older discussions they had been named "precious" files. But, as far as I remember, there was no easy solution. In that sense I don't have a better answer. Others may have.

Thanks for reporting, it make me read [1] and come to the conclusion that it is sometimes safer to checkout out a temporary branch, commit everything and clean up later, rather than relying too much on `git stash`

<https://stackoverflow.com/questions/835501/how-do-you-stash-an-untracked-file>

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>
> What's different between what you expected and what actually happened?
> The file doesn't exist anymore and I can't recover it.
>
> Anything else you want to add:
> This is just a reproducible example.
>