My stash wants to delete all my files

Heya, I've run into a problem with git stash. I suspect that I've already lost the work that I tried to stash, but would like to know where I went wrong.

I had some work in progress, wanted to check something from my last commit, and typed "git stash". I forgot to "git stash apply" immediately afterward, and carried on doing some more work related to the stashed code. I realized that I'd got a stash that I wanted to apply, and tried to restore it. While trying to restore it, I typed "git stash --apply", which actually created a new stash named "--apply". Ooops. Anyway, the real problem is :

$ git stash list stash@{0}: On master: --apply stash@{1}: WIP on master: 09e3c30... Better handling of cell sizes in the grid

$ git stash show stash@{1}
  .gitignore                            |    3 -
  AppController.h                       |   10 -
  AppController.m                       |   30 -
  English.lproj/InfoPlist.strings       |  Bin 202 -> 0 bytes
  English.lproj/MainMenu.xib            | 2560  
---------------------------------
  GLScene.h                             |   21 -
  GLScene.m                             |  287 ----
  Info.plist                            |   28 -
  LayoutManager.h                       |   19 -
  LayoutManager.m                       |  118 --
  OpenGLTests.xcodeproj/project.pbxproj |  323 -----
  OpenGLTests_Prefix.pch                |   10 -
  TheWall.h                             |   28 -
  TheWall.m                             |   99 --
  UserImage.h                           |   17 -
  UserImage.m                           |  111 --
  Utilities.h                           |   38 -
  Utilities.m                           |   89 --
  main.m                                |   14 -
  19 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 3805 deletions(-)

Hmm. Looks like it's trying to delete all of my versioned files. "git stash apply stash@{1}" confirms this. Obviously that's not what I tried to stash - my WIP when I stashed was a few additions, a couple of new unversioned files, and moving a few lines of code from one file to another.

Any ideas what happened there? I can't seem to reproduce the problem in a test repository.

Cheers, Jon

Jonathan del Strother <maillist@steelskies.com> writes:

There are two possibilities that I can think of offhand, neither of them is about git-stash but about the state you ran stash from.

Whenever anybody wonders where inadvertent reverting changes come from, two most likely reasons are incorrect push into the current branch's tip initiated from elsewhere, or incorrect fetch into the current branch's tip initiated from the repository.

If your work repository is foo, and if you are working on 'master' branch, you could

	$ cd ../bar ; git push ../foo master:master

to push from elsewhere to update the tip of the checked out branch. This makes the index and the work tree that was based on the old commit in foo repository totally out of sync with respect to the HEAD (which you are replacing), and committing that state would revert the change the above push made.

You can do the same by doing something equally silly and destructive by:

	$ git fetch --update-head-ok ../bar master:master

After these operations that could make your index and work tree state to include reverts, if you "stash", the stash will record that the reverting was what you wanted to do.

I am not saying this is the only possible explanation though. You can try:

	git ls-tree stash@{1}
        git rev-parse stash@{1}^1
        git diff stash@{1}^1 stash@{1}^2

The stash entry itself is the state of the work tree, its first parent (i.e. ^1) is the commit your stash was originally based on, and its second parent (i.e. ^2) is what was recorded in the index. Is the output from the first one empty? Does the second command show you that you were on the commit you thought you were on? Does the third command show you what you thought you have told "git add" to put in the index just before you made the stash?

On 25 Sep 2007, at 02:26, Junio C Hamano wrote:

I'm working on a single isolated repository, so haven't pushed, pulled, fetched, or anything.

ls-tree is empty. rev-parse confirms I was on the right revision when I stashed, and the diff shows everything being deleted.

I don't think I git-added anything - just made changes to the working copy. (It *does* stash those, right??)

I'm at a loss to explain what happened here...

Hi,

On Tue, 25 Sep 2007, Jonathan del Strother wrote:

Stash does not care about things that are not tracked, so no, it does not stash those. Imagine a stash saving all those .o, .a and .so files... Insanity!

Ciao, Dscho

On 25 Sep 2007, at 10:56, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

Mm, ok - fair point. I was actually thinking of files that are already tracked, but haven't been added to the staging area with git add.

Hi,

On Tue, 25 Sep 2007, Jonathan del Strother wrote:

Ah.  I read your statement as "I don't think I git-added anything, ever".

So this is what stash is supposed to do:

- save the differences between the HEAD and the index

- save the differences between the HEAD and the working tree

- reset the index and the working tree to the state of the HEAD

So indeed, I am as puzzled as you are.  Maybe it was your initial commit?

Ciao, Dscho