Undo git stash pop that results in merge conflict

Question

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?

Answer 1

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}