Git stash single untracked file?

Question

Question:

I have a couple of edited files as listed below, and also I have some newly created files

Now I want to stash the untracked file (in this case, it's db/migrate/20161212071336_add_paranoid_fields.rb, but not stash the changed files).

How should I do that?

Why I want to stash a single untracked file

I created this file at first, and then I realised that I don't need it immediately (it needs to be deleted in order for my program to work correctly); but I might need it in future.

What I've searched (and not giving me an answer), and the reason why they don't help

• How do you stash an untracked file?
  • this would stash all files; I want on stash only a single file.
• how can I git stash a specific file?
  • it suggests to use stash -p, but this would only stash the tracked file.

Answer 1

In git version 2.21.0 (Windows MingW64)

You can do:

git stash push --include-untracked -- db/migrate/20161212071336_add_paranoid_fields.rb

Only the specified file is included in the stash. You can provide multiple files (both untracked and tracked) and what you specify will be stashes and checked out as normal, the other files remain as is.

Answer 2

If you only have this one untracked file you can do:

git add -u
git stash --include-untracked --keep-index

And that will add only untracked files to the stash, and remove them from the working directory.

If you have several untraked files and you want to include just this one to the stash, then you will have to do a commit, then the stash of the single file and then a reset

git add -u
git commit -m "temp commit"
git add my_file_to_stash
git stash
git reset --hard HEAD^

The subtlely here is that when you recover the stash later, that file will be added to the index. That is probably a good thing, as it will remind you that this file is important.