Undo git stash pop that results in merge conflict

I began making changes to my codebase, not realizing I was on an old topic branch. To transfer them, I wanted to stash them and then apply them to a new branch off of master. I used git stash pop to transfer work-in-progress changes to this new branch, forgetting that I hadn't pulled new changes into master before creating the new branch. This resulted in a bunch of merge conflicts and loss of a clean stash of my changes (since I used pop).

Once I recreate the new branch correctly, how I can I recover my stashed changes to apply them properly?

5 Answers

As it turns out, Git is smart enough not to drop a stash if it doesn't apply cleanly. I was able to get to the desired state with the following steps:

1. To unstage the merge conflicts: git reset HEAD . (note the trailing dot)
2. To save the conflicted merge (just in case): git stash
3. To return to master: git checkout master
4. To pull latest changes: git fetch upstream; git merge upstream/master
5. To correct my new branch: git checkout new-branch; git rebase master
6. To apply the correct stashed changes (now 2nd on the stack): git stash apply stash@{1}

Luckily git stash pop does not change the stash in the case of a conflict!

So nothing, to worry about, just clean up your code and try it again.

Say your codebase was clean before, you could go back to that state with: git checkout -f
Then do the stuff you forgot, e.g. git merge missing-branch
After that just fire git stash pop again and you get the same stash, that conflicted before.

Keep in mind: The stash is safe, however, uncommitted changes in the working directory are of course not. They can get messed up.

git reset --merge 

The simplest command, it works everywhere including git stash pop.

Careful! You'll lose all changes on untracked files.

Instructions here are a little complicated so I'm going to offer something more straightforward:

1. git reset HEAD --hard Abandon all changes to the current branch

2. ... Perform intermediary work as necessary

3. git stash pop Re-pop the stash again at a later date when you're ready

git checkout -f 

must work, if your previous state is clean.