Often, when you’ve been working on part of your project, things are in a messy state and you want to switch branches for a bit to work on something else. The problem is, you don’t want to do a commit of half-done work just so you can get back to this point later. The answer to this issue is the git stash command.
You can also put it somthing like this, Your code is in progress and suddenly a customer escalation comes. Because of this, you have to keep aside your new feature work for a few hours. You cannot commit your partial code and also cannot throw away your changes. So you need some temporary space, where you can store your partial changes and later on commit it.
Stashing takes the dirty state of your working directory – that is, your modified tracked files and staged changes – and saves it on a stack of unfinished changes that you can reapply at any time.
# Modify | Add Some files in Git working directory
$ git status
Now you want to switch branches, but you don’t want to commit what you’ve been working on yet; so you’ll stash the changes. To push a new stash onto your stack, run git stash or git stash save:
$ git stash
Your working directory is clean:
$ git status
At this point, you can easily switch branches and do work elsewhere; your changes are stored on your stack. To see which stashes you’ve stored, you can use git stash list:
$ git stash list
stash@{0}: WIP on master: 049d078 added the index file
stash@{1}: WIP on master: c264051 Revert "added file_size"
stash@{2}: WIP on master: 21d80a5 added number to log
If you want to apply one of the older stashes, you can specify it by naming it, like this: git stash apply stash@{2}.
$git stash apply stash@{2}
If you don’t specify a stash, Git assumes the most recent stash and tries to apply it:
$ git stash applyCode language: PHP (php)
I’m Rajesh Kumar, a DevOps, SRE, DevSecOps, Cloud, and Platform Engineering expert passionate about sharing practical knowledge, real-world experiences, and industry best practices. I have worked at Cotocus and regularly write about technology, travel, investing, health, product reviews, and digital marketing through my various platforms.
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Good hands-on explanation of
git stashand how it helps save uncommitted work temporarily. One practical thing worth adding is that in real team workflows, stashes can quickly become a “hidden state problem” if overused—people forget what they stored or apply it on the wrong branch later. In CI/CD or collaborative environments, it’s usually safer to prefer short-lived feature branches over long stash chains, since stashes don’t get reviewed, tracked, or protected like commits do.