Find and extract file from Git stash

Question

Maybe I'm using git stash too often, but that's what I usually do when I want to throw away my experiments in the project.

Question 1:

• How could I search for a filename in all my current stashes?

Question 2:

• How could I extract this file to separate folder?

• or another option: How to launch visual diff tool for that stashed file?

Answer 1

A little more to the point would be to recognize that refs/stash is reflog of a a pseudo-branch (ref):

git rev-list --walk-reflogs stash # (long option)
git rev-list -g stash # (short option)

So you could locate the file:

for sha in $(git rev-list -g stash); 
do 
     git ls-tree -r $sha:; 
done |
   grep "$SOMEFILENAME" | 
   sort --unique

(The unique sort is to remove duplicates of the same version in different stashes).

E.g.:

$ for sha in $(git rev-list -g stash); do git ls-tree -r $sha:; done | grep numeric.js | sort -u
100644 blob f1c9a61910ae1bbd562615444a45688b93e9d808    LSPO.Web/DaVinci/JScript/numeric.js

So you can launch a visual diff using e.g.

kompare numeric.js <(git cat-file -p f1c9a61910ae1bbd562615444a45688b93e9d808)

Of course, if you already had a hunch which reflog contained the different file, this would be much easier:

git diff stash@{3} -- numeric.js 

Answer 2

The answer from @sehe gives a great answer for Question 2.

I came to this page looking for a better answer to Question 1 than what I currently use. What I currently use is a shell script stashshowall.sh and then I grep the output.

The difference of my answer is that while the other answers here tell you whether the file that you are looking for was changed, they don't tell you which stash the file is in in case you want to apply that stash.

My answer is purely using "porcelain" git commands, but it works for me.

#!/bin/sh
#  stashshowall.sh
for stash in `git stash list | sed 's/\(\w*\)\:.*/\1/'`
do
    echo
    echo "$stash"
    git stash show $stash
done

So to answer Question 1, I run

> stashshowall.sh | grep "stash\|some-file"

which gives me

stash@{0}
stash@{1}
 .../some-dir/some-file     | 16 ++--
stash@{2}
stash@{3}
stash@{4}
 .../some-dir/some-file     | 2 ++--
stash@{5}

This way I know that I need to apply or look further at stash{1} or stash{4}