Git stash: “Cannot apply to a dirty working tree,

Question

I am trying to apply changes I stashed earlier with git stash pop and get the message:

Cannot apply to a dirty working tree, please stage your changes

Any suggestion on how to deal with that?

Answer 1

I was unable to get most of these to work; for some reason it always thinks I have local changes to a file. I can't apply a stash, patches won't apply, checkout and reset --hard fail. What finally worked was saving the stash as a branch with git stash branch tempbranchname, and then doing a normal branch merge: git checkout master and git merge tempbranchname. From http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Tools-Stashing :

If you want an easier way to test the stashed changes again, you can run git stash branch, which creates a new branch for you, checks out the commit you were on when you stashed your work, reapplies your work there, and then drops the stash if it applies successfully

Answer 2

I do it in this way:

git add -A
git stash apply

and then (optionaly):

git reset

Answer 3

When I have to apply stashed changes to a dirty working copy, e.g. pop more than one changeset from the stash, I use the following:

$ git stash show -p | git apply -3 && git stash drop

Basically it

1. creates a patch
2. pipes that to the apply command
3. if there are any conflicts they will need to be resolved via 3-way merge
4. if apply (or merge) succeeded it drops the just applied stash item...

I wonder why there is no -f (force) option for git stash pop which should exactly behave like the one-liner above.

In the meantime you might want to add this one-liner as a git alias:

$ git config --global --replace-all alias.unstash \
   '!git stash show -p | git apply -3 && git stash drop'
$ git unstash

---

Thanks to @SamHasler for pointing out the -3 parameter which allows to resolve conflicts directly via 3-way merge.

Answer 4

You have files that have been modified but not committed. Either:

git reset --hard HEAD (to bring everything back to HEAD)

or, if you want to save your changes:

git checkout -b new_branch
git add ...
git commit
git checkout -b old_branch
git stash pop

Answer 5

You can apply a stash to a "dirty" tree by doing a git add to stage any changes you've made, thus cleaning up the tree. Then you can git stash pop and apply the stashed changes, no problem.

Answer 6

None of these answers actually work if you find yourself in this situation as I did today. Regardless of how many git reset --hard's I did, it got me nowhere. My answer (not official by any means was):

1. Figure out the stash's hash use git reflog --all
2. Merge that hash with the branch you're interested in